Making the rounds
With sales figures of the grossly overpriced WiFi grips not going so well, it’s been suggested new grips will be coming for a few cameras. The grips will be GPS capable.
If it were true, I’d expect to see them for the xxD and 7D initially
The source claims the GPS grips will not have WiFi as well.
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38 Comments
First again!
I’d buy one for my 5D II.
Id buy one for my 7D
Greedy bastards.
Just make one grip that has it all: Extra batteries, WIfi, GPS and what have you. I will be willing to pay an arm for it.
Irrelevant again.
To actually contribute:
I would buy one of these in a half second if the price was about 300usd. I am surprised this hasn’t been done yet. The big knock on gps taggers is the bat drain. Problem solved.
Woohoooo that would be Great!
I work with a Wintec WBT- 202 – great GPS Receiver. But I would buy a GPS/Batterie-Grip up to 350€
The GPS functionality should have been built-in to the EOS line. There are other cameras that cost much less that are 12MP, have wifi, bluetooth, video, and GPS in them.
No WiFi? It won’t be a WFT (Wireless file Transmitter). The II version for some existing models allows use of a bluetooth dongle (one of those tiny ones that sticks out of the usb port by 3/8 inch. This lets you connect to a bluetooth GPS. So the existing ones have usb, WIFI, bluetooth capable, and networking.
I would not want to lose that just to get built-in GPS. Cost would be $1000 msrp.
I bought the WIFI Grip for my 5D Mark II, almost exclusively for the GPS functionality. These things are far too expensive, and the kicker? They don’t even come with a battery ($100) that is required for them to operate. ugh.
Really? Which ones?
I think the Wifi grip prices are a big rip-off.
And if I’m right, don’t even includes the “n” specification.
The profit margin to Canon must be huge, including accounting for the development costs.
I want a grip with a joystick so I can select my AF points when holding my camera in a vertical position.
With an MP3 player would be a must have ;-)
Much more important than wifi or GPS IMHO
Since phones can get wifih/gps into a tiny package lets have a grip like the current wireless ones with full wifi (N or whatever is up from that, need some future proofing) and GPS. Make it retail for around $400-500 at MOST. Then it would be epic.
I’d buy one for my 7D and one for the T2i which I’m trying to buy but nobody seems to have in stock now :(
That would be a totally stupid idea. To get a good fix, GPS devices need to receive as much different satellites as possible, all with a good signal strength. And at roughly 1.5GHz, radio waves get very touchy. Image what some pound of metal, glass and plastic – IOW the camera and the lens – on top of the receiver will do to signal strengths .
I still remember when I got my first Canon DSLR. I though that WiFi would be a must have – until I saw the price. I have maybe $6,000 of Canon stuff, but I just can’t face paying many hundreds for WiFi and GPS which can be built from inexpensive commodity parts.
My hiking GPS works just fine for tagging my photos…and it’s a hiking GPS too!
No t’anks, Canon. I buy enough of your overpriced equipment. Don’t need your GPS
I doubt that their margins are huge – the software that these grips run is quite complicated, the design is very well done and with such a small demand for it – they have to charge a lot.
Now, if it was something much more general as simply providing GPS tagging a la Nikon’s GP1, we could have something that is both profitable and inexpensive as a result of a relatively high-volume of sales.
If a GPS “add-on” was available, I am sure many Canonites would pick one up.
Imagine this: a portable GPS unit (very small) with a Canon expansion port on it, fits under the camera without adding extra weight and hardly noticeable. This would be ideal.
+1
For one thing, the price keeps the demand low.
Now that the development is done, they might as well lower the price and gain on sales numbers – with the fringe benefit of selling more cameras because the package including GPS is available.
The sneaky way of doing this, of course, would be to include the GPS subunit in a prosumer camera like the 60D, so that professionals and full frame users still have to shell out for the overpriced add-on grip.
As for third-party add-ons that interface with the camera, I bet that the interface is proprietary and protected by all kinds of legal barriers to avoid this happening.
I just looked-up 7D grip prices at BH.
All are USA $ and warranty pricing.
Canon BG-E7 battery grip = $180
Canon WFT-E5A wireless grip = $629
difference is $449 for the wireless technology only.
So how much does it cost you to get wireless added to your laptop including all the software to make it work $50….out of this world pricing would be $100 so then double that for Canon pricing to $200….so my thake is a wireless grip should be $380 (180 + 200), OK now add GPS for the expensive price of $100…for a max of $480 for everything……
Canon is just greedy.
2 grips fo the 7d?
I want to know too.
+1
If Apple can make an iPhone with WiFi, GPS, GSM, a 3.5″ LCD, 16GB RAM, and an ARM processor running a custom-written OS, and sell it for $500, what do you think Canon’s WFT grip is REALLY worth?
It’s kind of Catch 22.
They are expensive because they don’t make and sell many, but they don’t sell many because they are expensive.
Yeah, but they sell millions and millions of iPhones.
It’s all about economies of scale.
Yeah! It might be nearly as bad as using GPS in your car, with all its metal, glass and plastic.
See how the very first item on that spec. list for “other cameras” is the number of megapixels? This is why manufacturers keep increasing them. It’s the number one item used in comparisons and bigger is considered better.
My new phone has a camera (wow!) and a colleague asked me, “What kind of camera is it?” I said, “You know, one of those crappy phone ones that I’ll probably never use.” “No,” he said, “How many *megapixels* has it got?” That was all he wanted to know to judge whether it was good or bad.
Anyway, the phone has GPS and cell triangulation. I installed a little logger app and suddenly I don’t feel the need for GPS on my *real* camera any more. I turn on the logger, leave the phone in my pocket and just shoot away. Matching the data up is just a button push in PP.
Because the cell triangulation works reasonably well indoors (at times), the set-up is probably more useful than vanilla GPS in a camera. I also have nice little apps for DOF calculations, etc.
So, just buy a smart phone and use it with your dumb camera, at least until they stop making dumb cameras or charging extra for the smarts.
Nice try. :-)
A stand-alone GPS device for in-car use usually only has to cope with *one* thin layer of glas, i.e. the windshield. Furthermore, it is usally mounted in a way that gives a f.o.v. of about 180°, including straight up.
A fixed car GPS might even have its own antenna mounted on the outsight of the car – e.g. the tiny “shark fin” antenna on current BMWs.
iSuppli estimate that the iPad GPS unit costs $2.60. That’s about 1% of the materials cost of the system. A camera already has most of the other parts in place, so you’d be willing to pay nearly 20,000% mark-up? That’s the problem right there. People are willing to pay stupid amounts of money for this stuff.
Canon could probably integrate GPS into a camera for under $10 and, using more realistic mark-up of 200%, it would add under $30 to the retail price of the camera. Now, with people willing to pay “$400-500 at MOST”, what do you think Canon will do? They’ll sell us another obscenely expensive accessory.
For comparison, Samsung’s HZ35W compact zoom is almost the same as the HZ30W, but the former has GPS (and a better screen) and costs $70 more (MSRP). Both cameras cost less than you are willing to pay just for a GPS module. In fact, over at B&H, you can have the two of them for $580.
A built-in GPS could have its antenna in a reasonable place on top of the camera. A grip…
someone needs to come out with a GPS enabled CF card!
I’d buy one for my T2i if it was $349 or less.
I want a GPS grip so bad. Can an third party make one? I take it Canon doesn’t release their specs to anyone else, so probably not.
It would be nice. Some of the third party grips made for canon cameras are pretty sweet, including things like intervalometers and LCD screens to make it more than just “extra batteries with vertical buttons”
I’d go for some kind of GPS system too – but the current Canon solution does seem to be too pricey.
I think travel photographers/bloggers would snap up a reasonably priced Canon or third-party GPS tagging accessory. I would. Some point and shoot cameras already come with GPS built in, why not a $1,500 dSLR?
I hope Canon is reading this!