Sean’s House

When I heard that Sony had announced a standalone GPS logger, the GPS-CS1, I was hopeful and fearful at the same time, especially once I saw it would be bundled with software that was only “guaranteed to work with Sony Cameras”. Well, I picked one up today, and I can safely say that Sony did it right. When you plug it into your computer, it shows up as a USB flash disk, with a GPS subdirectory. Inside that directory are a series of text files that are NMEA GPS logs. Everything is logged in GMT, including the timestamps on the files. (which makes sense when you think about it).

I downloaded a demo of RoboGEO, a commercial win32 geotagging program, as it was the first program I found. After deleting the first line of the test log file I made (sony puts in a line to identify the log file came from its device) RoboGEO was able to import the resulting NMEA file with no problems and tag the quick shots I made in the parking lot. According to the manual, it will record a location every 15 seconds, and battery life is approximately 360 hours on a single AA battery. From that you should get about 86,400 time/location records.

The device itself looks pretty nice too, with a carabiner included so you can hang it off your backpack or camera bag. That having been said, it’s not anything-proof. Not waterproof, water-resistant, dustproof, hot car for extended periods of time proof, magneticproof, dog slobber proof, you name it, Sony says to keep this thing away from it. So, the bottom line is if you’re looking for a (albeit expensive at $150) simple standalone GPS logger that will work (with minor tweaking) with pretty much any geotagging software out there, I don’t think you can beat this thing.

Update: The GPS Image Tracker software that comes with it will work with any JPEG pictures. However, it doesn’t properly account for DST, but you can adjust the timezone for any gps log that’s been imported.