Okay, this is too cool. The Nikon Coolpix P1 is an 8 megapixel digital camera with built-in wifi support. Imagine not having to hook up your camera to a cable or even pull out a memory card to transfer pictures. Instead, you can simply transfer them directly to your terabyte home storage network.
I hope this is a sign of many things to come.
Once they start building in GPS and automatic lat/long encoding in the EXIF data, I'll be upgrading. Camera, Wifi, and GPS. Three great tastes that go great together.
Posted by jzawodn at September 07, 2005 06:51 PM
Yeah, just imagine transferring directly to your home storage 'cos it is not going to happen in reality! The P1 is crippled - it'll connect and upload via wireless only to Nikon's Picture Project software.
at least until someone hacks it :-)
I wish the camera cell phones that also have GPS built-in would start storing the lat/long in the EXIF data.
I'm not much excited about WIFI in cameras. Memory cards that hold a lot of images are pretty cheap. And the WIFI would be useless where I shoot lots of images: national parks, wilderness, etc. But it'd be handy for "moblogging" stuff where WIFI does exist.
I've long wished cameras had GPS built-in that would put lat/long AND direction (hell, even pitch) in the EXIF data.
Why does it take so much for you to consider upgrading a camera. I'm already looking forward to the Canon 5d. Interested in my EFS 10-22mm lens? Just kidding - for now.
Nice amazon associate ID :)
Seriously though.. this is needed in an SLR. I want to take pics and have them uploaded the second I take them.
It also needs to support CDMA or EDGE or something.
I'd like to be able to take pictures and not be vulnerable to security guards or police taking my camera.
The pictures would already be on my server......
OK, I'll bite. What do you take images of that you are so worried about security and police? It sounds like wa you need is a cell phone that can take real picture - not the current crop of crap phones that try to give you everything and the kitchen sink and do nothing really well (other than generate profits for the provider).
Hi Jeremy, I see you also found one of the best ole planes there ever was built.. I fly R/C and a huge scale Aeronica is impossible to beat for fun and simplicity.
Well, WiFi in a digital camera is no breaking news - only it being built-in in a consumer-grade camera is.
Canon and Nikon have been offering WiFi modules for their professional cameras for years, and the most popular use for them is sports photography - during a game/event, every agency has a bunch of photographers on the field with cameras w/ WiFi modules, all images get uploaded to a workstation where there's a human filter, which looks at the images and selects those that will be uploaded to the agency's image bank.
This results in that, for example, in the World Championship in track/field in Helsinki, when someone broke the World Record again, the fresh-off-the-oven images were available on the web for journalists worldwide less than a minute later.
It occured to me that my digital camera and GPS should be combined so I wrote a simple bash script
that uses my pc's GPS software (gpsman) and exiftool to combine them on my pc.
############################################################################
# Copyright (C) 2005 by Kevin Waugh #
# waugh@metservice.com #
# #
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and#or modify #
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by #
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or #
# (at your option) any later version. #
# #
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, #
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of #
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the #
# GNU General Public License for more details. #
# #
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License #
# along with this program; if not, write to the #
# Free Software Foundation, Inc., #
# 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. #
############################################################################
#!/bin/bash
# GPS_exif - Copyright (C) 2005 Kevin Waugh
#
# This is a simple shell script that uses exiftool ( GPL Copyright 2003-2005, Phil Harvey and GPSman Copyright (c) 2004 Miguel Filgueiras )
# to syncronize your GPS and your digital camera.
#
# How does it work ?
# If you check that your camera is set to the same time as youre GPS go for a walk (its good for you)
# take a few photos.
# When you get home:
# download your GPS track into GPSman
# download your photos into a temp directory
# save your track from GPSman into the same directory as the photos with a filename of gps_track.gpm
# cd to the temp directory and run this script.
# It will extract the timestamp from the *.jpg files in the directory and for each look
# for a matching time in the GPS track and extract the lat/lon data and write it to a temp file
# in a format that exiftool can use to update the exif data of the photo
# exiftool makes a copy of the file it modifies (just in case :-)
#
# Because I normally have my GPS (a Garmin etrex) track recording set to auto I ignore the seconds in the timestamp
# of the photo. I am usually stopped for more that a minute when I am taking photos
# However if you want higher resolution you can set your GPS to record trackpoints every second
# and change the line where the timestamp is extracted from the photo, I use %X for my local (NZ) if I want seconds
#
#
# Below is an example of the track file saved from GPSman
#
# % Written by GPSManager 27-Aug-2005 17:30:26 (NZST)
# % Edit at your own risk!
#
# !Format: DMS +12 WGS 84
# !Creation: yes
#
# !T: ACTIVE LOG width=2 colour=#8b0000 GD310:display=~|Z
# 27-Aug-2005 17:10:39 S41 13 35.5 E174 49 17.6 196.246337891
# 27-Aug-2005 17:11:01 S41 13 35.5 E174 49 17.6 196.726928711
# 27-Aug-2005 17:11:09 S41 13 35.8 E174 49 17.9 195.284912109
# 27-Aug-2005 17:11:12 S41 13 35.8 E174 49 18.0 195.765625
#
ls *.jpg > files.dat
grep -v "#" exif_params
exiftool -@ exif_params $filename
# rm -f exif_params
# fi
done
done
exit
Oops it didn't show the code here is is commented
(I hope :-)
# ls *.jpg > files.dat
#
# grep -v "#" exif_params
# exiftool -@ exif_params $filename
# # rm -f exif_params
#
# # fi
# done
#
# done
# exit
I guess I can't post the code. E-mail me if you want to see it (it is only about a dozen lines )
Kevin, most probably the problem is that your script contains less-than characters (for input redirection), which Jeremy's MT comment system interprets as the start of an HTML tag :) You could try replacing them with the ampersand-'lt'-semicolon sequence, just as in, well, HTML - then it would probably work.
Other than that, just a quick comment: the hash-bang /bin/bash line is absolutely *no* use if it is not the very first line of the file. Its point is to let the kernel know which program it should use as an interpreter for this script (in this case, /bin/bash), and the kernel only looks at the very first line (or, more precisely, at the first two characters of the file to check if they are '#' and '!').
Oh, and... I haven't seen the whole script, so this may be a bit off-base, but... does it really use bash's extensions, or can it be run just as well under a "normal" /bin/sh Bourne shell?
Over on Zoto we exctract any GPS EXIF info that you have and use it to generate a Google Map with the photo in it. I wrote a HOWTO using a Garmin Forerunner and Location Stamper from M$ on my blog at http://kordless.blogspot.com/
I haven't really seen any good GPS/camera solutions out there. The Ricoh seems to be a good solution, but it's a GPS PCMCIA card that plugs in the bottom of the unit and the camera is only 3.0MP. There aren't many places selling these things either.
Hopefully within a year or so we'll see more cameras with GPS in them, or more camera phones with better cameras, that are also supporting GPS.
I just bought a P1. It's nice. I'm not sure what I'm doing with it yet but that will come. The wireless is pretty cool but it's harder to set up than I'd like.
If you leave your network open then it's easy.
I've been unable to install the Nikon Picture Project software as of yet. Nikon is sending me a new CD.
It's a cool little camera. So far so good.
The Nikon Coolpix P1 has a simple connectivity and prakris, with wifi support. But this will be a problem if we want to connect with a gadget that does not support wifi, because it is still a little gadget that has wifi support now.
