POLL: What's more important, gps or wifi?

[noncho]

WiFi for the great remote control options.

 

[2n10]

Neither. But I do see the advantages of both if my style changes. GPS would be the most likely for me since I mostly shoot wildlife.

 

[Taemobig]

Wifi seems more useful for me. Being able to control and see liveview wirelessly from the camera is something pros can actually use. I had a job where I was given a 20 ft. crane jib to use for a music video, it would have been so much easier to use if I could focus, start recording, and see liveview with the camera up 20 feet in the air.

 

[Valvebounce]

Hi Marsu.
I would like to say don't need either, but it have tried that many times to tag images using a GPX tag, both apple and droid, different time zones on devices (read forgot to sync), daylight savings different (read forgot to sync).
Trouble is even when I didn't forget to sync the locations came out wrong, I guess it was something to do with operator error with the software.

Cheers, Graham.

 

[LDS]

Bluetooth... LOL!

(this way you could use your smartphone both for GPS and WiFi)

Jokes aside, it all depends on what kind of photos you do more. You may need one, both or none.

And I've yet to see a Canon camera supporting WiFi Enterprise (pre-shared keys are not secure).

 

[c.d.embrey]

Having GPS allows government snooping If you have GPS, NSA will always know where you and your camera are located I know, I know privacy is a thing from the past and will never be seen again

Using WiFi to communicate with a client's iPad, etc is a money maker

 

[Marsu42]

Having GPS allows government snooping If you have GPS, NSA will always know where you and your camera are located I know, I know privacy is a thing from the past and will never be seen again

Um, how is that? I'm very privacy aware, but it's just a *passive* gps *receiver* and you don't need to export the gps tags from your postprocessing software when uploading to the net. The real gouvernment spy device is in your mobile phone because it's easy to triangulate your position using cell phone masts or your login data from public wifi.

Not that I worry about govt snooping on my GPS but that reminds me of a question - how hard would the Canon wifi systems be to hack? Could some malicious hacker format your card?

The way the wifi firmware works, it looks like Canon bought a software part from a 3rd party and glued it to their firmware. Unless there are dedicated backdoors, I'd say it's as safe as it gets if you don't chose "passw0rd" as your password, the wifi uses that latest encryption and authentication standard.

Btw here are the most popular iCloud passwords from the recent hack - is your's included ? ... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackappcom/ibrute/master/passlist.txt

 

[dgatwood]

Easy. GPS. Wi-Fi is easy to replace by carrying a little more gear, whereas GPS isn't.

It's a pain in the backside to geotag photos without in-body GPS. If you use an external receiver, that's one more piece of gear that has to be continuously attached to your camera. If you use track logs, that's one more battery to keep charged.

Also, the precision of geotagging is likely to be better with in-camera GPS, because the camera knows when you pressed the shutter, and can get coordinates at that exact moment instead of on a ten second interval or whatever.

By contrast, it's not that hard to carry around an SD card adapter for my phone (to replace one of my uses for Wi-Fi) and a radio remote (to replace the other one). The batteries in a remote last for months, so they're a non-issue. And although radio remotes do require a device to be attached to your camera, you probably won't need to have it attached for every shot for days on end, unlike your GPS receiver.

Also, the alternatives to Wi-Fi work a bit better than Canon's Wi-Fi implementation, IMO, albeit at a cost in terms of the amount of extra gear you're carrying around. In particular, the EOS Remote app doesn't appear to support continuous shooting, unless I'm misusing it somehow. And because it operates in live view mode, focusing is slow, effectively giving you a huge shutter lag. With that said, it is still better than a timer.

 

[Mitch.Conner]

Unless there are dedicated backdoors, I'd say it's as safe as it gets if you don't chose "passw0rd" as your password,

Who would be dumb enough to do that?

I mean, come on, it's spelled wrong. That's a zero, not a letter O. Geez. Some people. :

 

[Maximilian]

and a camera that isn't sucking out life of the battery with such things.

It hasn't been mentioned here, but fyi and concerning the poll: gps on the 6d has very little power drain while wifi empties your battery in no time.

Thanks for that information.
Hopefully Canon and any other camera manufacturer is implementing the possibility to switch those gimmicks OFF.
Of course they might be handy by time, but I would like to decide when. And still I don't need them.

 

[Marsu42]

Hopefully Canon and any other camera manufacturer is implementing the possibility to switch those gimmicks OFF.

Of course you can switch off wifi & gps (the 6d has even a wifi indicator on the top lcd which is a complete waste of space). The catch with the 6d and probably 7d2 is just that gps stays on on camera off to continue the track log - so you have to remember to switch it on/off manually each time (or use Magic Lantern).

 

[bholliman]

I occasionally use wifi but have never used GPS. As long as I can turn them off to save battery life, I don't care if they are there or not.

 

[Badger]

I will say, I use GPS with just about all my pictures. I like having that information and using the Maps feature on LR is cool. I almost never use the WiFi feature but when I have needed it, it has been invaluable. I use the WiFi feature primarily to share pictures while on the go. Yes, I shoot RAW also but the combination of the Canon remote software and DropBox have worked out great when I needed it. I would probably give up WiFi first just because I don't use it that often, but I wouldn't give up GPS.

 

[weixing]

Hi,
It's good to have, but ok if don't have. But I'll prefer a reliable GPS over a wifi.

The 6D had both wifi and GPS, but the GPS take very long to get a lock on the GPS, so I use a Garmin eTrex 30 to produce a gpx file for tagging. So I hope the 7D2 GPS implementation is better and more reliable than 6D... Also, happy that 7D2 had a digital compass... may be Canon can add a map function in the camera... ha ha ha

Have a nice day.

 

[AvTvM]

In 2014 I only consider Canon cameras with all 4 radio modules built-in. No excuse tolerated.

* WiFi (b/g/n and ac)
* GPS
* NFC
* RT-EX radio flash commander

Since Canon is not willing and/or able to .. I will not buy anything from them. It's that simple.

 

[Marsu42]

* RT-EX radio flash commander
Since Canon is not willing and/or able to .. I will not buy anything from them. It's that simple.

This is really one thing I'm disappointed about, probably they have the same transmission problems as with wifi in a metal body (5d3/5d4/7d2) and just for product policy's sake won't have the lesser plastic models (6d,70d) have a built-in rt controller either :-o

 

[dickgrafixstop]

Neither is important for photography. Either could be important to someone, but as near as I can tell neither affects image quality. Call me a Luddite, but the fewer electronic features, the less there is to go wrong. Now
for a minimum featured FD mount DSLR......

 

[tbadowski]

I could really use WIFI with my 5D mk III for several reasons-
* Product Photography for my wife's Ebay - the "studio" is on another floor, and to have the photos uploaded automatically would be very helpful

* Remote control / IPAD -

Given that it may not fit in the body or drain power too much, I would suggest a Mega "Grip" with:
>Extra Batteries
>WIFI
> GPS
> ST-R3 remote flash controller

 

[dgatwood]

Hopefully Canon and any other camera manufacturer is implementing the possibility to switch those gimmicks OFF.

Of course you can switch off wifi & gps (the 6d has even a wifi indicator on the top lcd which is a complete waste of space). The catch with the 6d and probably 7d2 is just that gps stays on on camera off to continue the track log - so you have to remember to switch it on/off manually each time (or use Magic Lantern).

AFAIK, the camera doesn't actually save a track log unless you tell it to do so. But it does continue to have the GPS hardware update its position on a regular interval, in part because the GPS ephemeris data is only valid for a certain period of time (typically four hours), and if it gets stale, reacquiring a GPS lock takes much, much longer. And, in part, because actually acquiring a GPS position, even in hot start mode, would unnecessarily delay writing photos out to flash (by 1–5 seconds, depending on hardware), and they probably don't want to bother going back and rewriting the images after GPS data becomes available (even though they really should).

 

[dgatwood]

In 2014 I only consider Canon cameras with all 4 radio modules built-in. No excuse tolerated.

* WiFi (b/g/n and ac)
* GPS
* NFC
* RT-EX radio flash commander

Since Canon is not willing and/or able to .. I will not buy anything from them. It's that simple.

Agreed. I'm more than a bit fed up with Canon's absurd little game of haphazardly putting different random subsets of features in each of their cameras. It can't be expensive enough for this approach to make sense. Just put all the radios in every device already, and declare yourselves to be the first camera company to have GPS, Wi-Fi, and RF flash control in all your cameras.

(I don't particularly care about NFC. All that does is make it slightly easier to pair the camera with some cellular phones.)