42 
No doubt about it, for serious photographers, the brand new Canon 1D X has a metric tonne of reasons for why it deserves its place at the top rungs as the Canon flagship. It’s nothing short of an incredible camera; one that will have many a photographer drooling, and many a bank manager rubbing their hands in glee. It is, rather obviously, the most epic DSLR camera ever.
Which is, my dear reader, why I’m so bloody furious with Canon. Carrying a hefty £5,300 price tag, this piece of kit costs more than a snazzy-looking second-hand Porsche, so it had better be bloody awesome. Most signs point to ‘yes’. I’m not angry about the things Canon have included in this lovely package of photographic nirvana. I’m pissy about the things they’ve decided to make optional extras.
Specifically, the stand-alone products that are at the receiving end of my rage are the Canon GP-E1 GPS receiver and Canon WTF-E6 wireless transmitter. Canon claims that they “designed the GP-E1 to share the same rugged and durable exterior construction as the EOS-1D X without adding additional bulk”, which is outrageously ridiculous in itself. The very definition of “adding additional bulk” is having to attach an external thing to your camera in order to add extra functionality.
So, why didn’t Canon just build it into the camera? I have heard a few potential explanations, but they’re all absolute hogwash…
Pick up the smartphone that’s closest to you. Let’s say, for the sake of this argument, that it’s an iPhone 4S, which was launched at roughly the same time as the 1D X. Apple’s mobile contains Bluetooth; a GPS receiver; the radios needed for telephony and data traffic; WiFi; a digital compass; a 3.5-inch 960×640-pixel screen; a load of megapixels to boot, and enough processing power to edit photos on the go.
An Apple iPhone 4S is 63 cm3 and weighs 140g. The camera is 2,150 cm3 or so. That means that the camera is roughly 34 times larger than the phone, and weighs approximately 10 times more (though that’s just a guess, given its predecessors’ weight, as Canon hasn’t released official weight figures yet). Saying that there isn’t space to include three measly extra radios and a bit of extra electronics is just daft. If anyone tells you otherwise, hold up any modern smart-phone and tell them to shut their pie-holes.
We can’t say that there’s no precedent for including this sort of tech into cameras either. Say what you will about the Fujifilm FinePix XP30 (for example, that it’s one of the most hideous cameras ever made), but it comes with a £150 price-tag, and has GPS built-in. As for WiFi, take the Samsung SH100. Acquiring one lightens your wallet by a featherweight £92, and it packs all sorts of gadgets — including WiFi — into a package that’s only 94 cm3. And it weighs less than the aforementioned iPhone 4S.
Oh, and on the issue of WiFi, a lot of us have been relying on Eye-Fi memory cards. That’s right – a flippin’ SD card that packs up to 8GB of storage and full WiFi functionality. I would, at this time, invite you to reach for your nearest camera, and grab the SD card out of it. Now marvel. An Eye-Fi card is the size of a postage stamp and about as thick as a coin. They can be had from about £40, too, which isn’t that much more expensive than a non-WiFi-enabled high-end SD card. Tech like this is nothing short of actual magic. But it exists, and has done so for about half a decade.
So, dearest Canon, the tech is out there. I suspect you are aware of this, since most of the SD-card cameras you’ve sold in the last few years are Eye-Fi compatible. Oh, and do you remember the lovely Canon PowerShot SX230 you announced in February? It’s a tiny, tiny camera that has GPS built-in…
If we for a moment ignore the slap in the face of not just including these features in the cameras in the first place, let’s take a look at the knockout punch: The price tag of the add-ons.
Once you’ve plonked down a small family saloon worth of cash, do you really want to pay another (rumoured) £190 for GPS functionality and £375 for the WiFi/Bluetooth features? I don’t want to sound ungrateful to the Gods of Photography, but £190 for a GPS chip? You have got to be shitting me — you can build your own GPS logger-shield for Arduino for under £12.50, and ready-built USB GPS receivers retail for just £26.
The WiFi/Bluetooth thingiemajig is even more insulting. Its rumoured £375 price-tag is enough to buy a whole additional Canon SLR camera body. Repeating the same exercise as above, if you were to add Bluetooth to your own homebrew project, you’re looking at a £25 pricetag. WiFi is a bit pricier, at £60 for the kit. Nonetheless, that still means that you, as a random average joe, can spend £85 to buy the components needed to build the gadgets Canon will be selling to you for around £565 — and that’s if our conversions based on the rumoured US price-tags pan out.
Keep in mind that these prices are retail price, too — there’s no way Canon doesn’t have some pretty serious buying power, both when it comes to twisting suppliers’ arms and that little concept of economics known as economy of scale. The components to build the GPS unit won’t cost Canon more than £5 or so, and the WiFi/Bluetooth unit might cost them £25. At the most.
So, what it all boils down to is that you can buy a weather-proof camera that has WiFi built in for £92 (that’s 25 per cent the price of the WiFi attachment for the Canon 1D X), or you could buy a GPS-enabled camera for £150 (less than half the GPS-attachment for Canon’s flagship).
My dear Canon, do you really hate your professional photographers that much?
On their American website, Canon state that “the GPS Receiver GP-E1 has not been authorised as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission”, which might explain in part why they decided to hold off on shipping them out. Presumably, choosing to include GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth would have to include a round of testing that might have delayed their project… But I’m sure people would have merrily waited a couple of months to have this stuff built in.
Another potential (if moderately far-fetched) reason for choosing to keep the GPS / WiFi / Bluetooth stuff external, is that these items are all transmitters/receivers. Not too long ago, for example, I had the opportunity to take photos in a military research facility, and one of the things I had to sign (in addition to the Official Secrets Act), was a declaration that I brought absolutely no electronics into the facility that could transmit or receive data. That included having to re-format my memory cards before entering the facility, in front of the security guys, and handing over my mobile phone and Kindle(!) for safe-keeping before I was allowed into the facility.
This type of thing is already a problem for journalists: It’s not illegal to send text messages from a court room, but take a photo, and you could end in deep doo-doo. As such, many journos tape off the cameras on their phones, choose cases for their phones that cover up the camera, or choose phones without cameras — all to avoid being accused of taking photos when they’re not supposed to. Employees that work in sensitive industries (such as GCHQ or the Security Services) are running into this problem in a more acute way — for some employees, any phone with a camera is completely banned, no matter if the camera is covered up or not. Have you tried finding a phone that doesn’t have a camera on it recently? It’s surprisingly tricky.
It isn’t unthinkable that there are agencies that need photography but ban all use of any GPS, Bluetooth or WiFi. Keeping these units as attachments could solve this problem, meaning that super-special scientific spy photographers can continue using Canon’s top-of-the-line snapper without running foul with their agency policies. It could also be the case that Canon wants to give photographers the option to not have transmitters or receivers on them in case they are taking scientific photos of some sort, that might be disturbed by any electronic interference… But surely there must be a better solution for those edge cases?
Okay, so I hate the kind of blogger who whines about something without offering up at least some idea towards a solution. Here we go…
If we, for a brief moment, accept that Canon has a good reason to not want to include radios in their top-end cameras, because a fraction of their user base might be put off by them… It could be solved very differently. Instead of adding expensive and clunky external units they could introduce expansion slots that keep the GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth chips and radios on compact-sized expansion modules, to be inserted into the camera body itself.
Obviously Canon would get big bonus points if these modules come included with the camera, so you can install them and then forget about them, instead of running the risk of forgetting your GPS unit when you really need it. This would keep the potential benefit of being able to update extension modules later. Hell, they could even consider opening up to third-party extension modules that could be inserted into the camera (RadioPopper, I’m looking at you here…), for semi-permanent extensions of functionality.
Just don’t insult us by charging us £565 for a set of ‘accessories’ that really ought to have been part of the original product. It makes your ‘flagship’ look an awfully lot less flagship-like.
Haje Jan Kamps is a prolific photography blogger who has written a small stack of books about photography. He also developed the Triggertrap camera trigger and has been known to travel the world a bit. If you’re of the tweeting kind, try him on @Photocritic!
Sigh, the author of this article doesn’t have a clue.
Possible reasons why it wasn’t included:
1. The majority wouldn’t want it, and thus don’t want to pay extra for something they don’t need. Amateurs might find it fun to geotag their photos and send them to their iPhones but the professionals that use this camera have little need to.
2. It might require external aerials due to the magnesium body shell and metal chassis.
3. For those that do want to transfer the photos ethernet it much faster, we’re talking about 12 18mp RAW images a second here.
4. The price isn’t a big deal. This is a camera that costs over £5k and the people that use it can make that much in as little as a few days.
5. The port they use may have future use for other accessories.
There’s probably other stuff I’m not thinking of too, but those reasons alone should be enough.
From the depth and detail in the article I would argue that the author actually does have a clue.
Saying the price does not matter is a ridiculous statement. No-one in their right mind would think nothing of splurging £550 on extra functionality that should have been included in the first place.
Why should it have been included, because you want it? I wish my camera came with a 17-40mm L but I realise that you don’t get stuff for free.
There’s a difference between core features for a SLR camera body (the processors, imaging chip, storage slots, and, in my opinion, the kind of features we’re talking about in this article – including WiFi and GPS), and auxiliary parts of the camera system – lenses, flashes, filters, tripods, etc.
I guess the core of our disagreement lies in that you appear to believe that GPS and WiFi are system accessories (like lenses and flashes), whereas I think that they ought to be core features of a camera system.
The main reason why I’m grouchy about this is that adding GPS and WiFi to the camera body would have cost Canon buttons – especially if they scale up the production of these features because it’s being included in every camera body. They could have raised the price of the camera body by £30 and included the features. Nobody would have batted an eyelid about the increase of price, but they would have achieved major acclaim for including it. Instead, they’re fleecing photographers £550 for things that other manufacturers are including as standard.
You are probably right about the cost, no doubt they’re making a fairly large profit, but remember as a company their main goal is to make that profit. Most companies do that by selling accessories, like games consoles with their expensive controllers and games, or Apple’s extortionate prices for hardware upgrades. Speaking of Apple no one bats an eyelid when they don’t include something everyone else has or charges more than the competition, despite the fact that everyone that buys their products would benefit from such features (copy and paste anyone?).
Hey Theran, Thank you for your feedback!
I am not at all sure if I agree with your “the majority wouldn’t want it” ascertation, do you have any numbers or figures to point to? I’d love to be proven wrong, but most of the high-end photographers I know are all gadget-fans. A lot of them are travel photographers, and whilst I doubt their sanity for travelling with heavy Canon 1-series kit, they all use external GPS solutions to geo-tag images, for example.
I buy the argument about external aerials, but mobile telephone manufacturers have been able to get around that for many years now; you very rarely see phones with external aerials. Bear in mind that mobile phones have to communicate with masts that are several miles away. The base-stations we’re talking about when it comes to Bluetooth will be meters away; WiFi base stations will be tens of meters away. That only leaves GPS, but there are plenty of products that have successfully built-in GPS solutions (phones and cameras, for example) without the need of external antennae.
Transferring images via Ethernet is an interesting choice. Cat-6 cables are readily available, and tend to be more flexible than other types of wires; they can also be much longer than many other wired data transfer methods. However, the USB 3.0 standard supports speeds 5 times faster than gigabit ethernet, and most photographers who shoot tethered would already be doing so over FW/USB, so moving away from that standard is a curious choice. I admit that the 300 mbps theoretical max of 802.11n (which tends to typically operate at around 100 mbps) is a limiting factor, but it’s still plenty fast for many applications.
I disagree that price isn’t a big deal – Even if you have £5k laying around and if you see high-end SLR cameras as a disposable piece of kit, having to extend your kit with two features that are built in as standard on even the cheapest of consumer products is downright insulting to your customer base.
Travel photographers aren’t really the intended market for the 1Dx, they don’t need the higher frame rates and ridiculous high ISO performance so there is the cheaper 1DsIII for them, or if they can manage with a little less weather sealing the 5DII. As for the professional travel shooters that can justify £2k+ on a body alone I don’t see why they’d need to geotag their photos, they’ll be getting paid for shooting so will only shoot what they need to, thus they will know where they are shooting before they even get there.
As for the GPS, ever in-car GPS I’ve seen (admittedly not a whole lot) has needed and external aerial, and my phone which doesn’t have one doesn’t exactly get the best signal.
USB 3.0 would be better, but is not widely adopted yet. With ethernet you can transfer to pretty much any computer, including laptops that can’t be upgraded to USB 3.0.
Photography is an expensive hobby and profession, especially if you want the best, and comparing a point and shoot with one of the best cameras available isn’t exactly fair. They’re tools, not gadgets that must include every piece of tech available in order for people to buy them.
I think, like all good cameras, it should and will ultimately be judged on the quality of the pictures it takes. Having said that, I can’t look past how ugly the thing is. Am I the only one that thinks the shape is all wrong?
It makes me think of early DSLRs, before the technology was compact enough to fit within a classically rectangle body shape.
If I wanted to spend an small fortune on a brick that takes awesome pictures, I’d probably get a Hasselblad.
I think the 1D’s are sexy, but it’s all down to personal preference. There’s not much they could have done to make the camera smaller, it’s square because it has a vertical shutter release and controls built in and a huge batter, and then it has a huge hump on top that’s filled with a massive glass prism which is vital to being able to see what you’re taking a photo of. DSLRs in general haven’t actually gotten any smaller if you discount the very first few that were adapted from film SLRs that basically had an imaging sensor strapped to the back and a huge old-tech battery. For example take a look at the 350D, it’s around the same size as today’s 600D, the D30 is around the same size as the 60D, 7D, and 5DII, and of course the 1Dx is almost exactly the same as the first 1D physically.
Fair enough, each to their own. Maybe, for safety, it’ll also come without a neck-strap.
Actually it comes with a lead lined one, gotta work those neck muscles xD.
If you can find a Hassie for £5k let me know. Can’t have fallen off the back of a lorry though.
Alright, unlike theran24 I won’t insult the author as the rest of the articles have been great.
1) You’re probably bang on the money about not wanting anything that could be classed as a transmitter/receiver in there. Canon probably looked into how much people were using them in situations that, well, lets say are ‘sensitive’, and decided not to isolate an area of the market that probably pays a very hefty price for kit.
2) It’s not a feature that I’ve heard most 1D shooters clamouring for. Which is not to say I haven’t heard a single 1D owner lusting for WiFi, but not many.
3) How do you know there’s no space in there? http://www.imaging-resource.com/NPICS1/EOS-1D_MARKIII_6_L.JPG that’s a cutaway of a MkIII and it looks pretty stuffed as it is, and keep in mind Canon have said they’ve put more tech in. It’s probably got more square inches of circuitry than most iPhones for sure.
4) The price. £550 is a lot for two doodads, but quite frankly Canon isn’t there to be your friend, they’re there to make cash money from pro photographers who love gadgets and have money to burn.
5) Why wouldn’t they stuff two devices that use radio frequencies right next to some *really* *really* sensitive sensors? There’s always then a potential for interference, imagine the outrage of photographers when their £5k camera isn’t performing it’s best.
“no space” should be just space.
You’re right, I was insensitive with my initial post. Perhaps he does know what he’s talking about, it’s just I’ve seen in the past clueless authors writing about camera tech on here when they clearly didn’t know what they were talking about.
If you’re already paying that much for a camera, would paying a little more for that functionality make that big a difference really?
As for people wanting GPS functionality built in, I’m fairly certain the Powershot SX230 HS sales figures should have given them an idea of whether it would make or break the sales numbers for the model (highly unlikely!).
Maybe the author should actually OWN a 1-series camera before they write about one. The whole 1-series Canon has been designed to be consistent from model to model so that pros like myself, who use the camera daily, can have our camera as a TOOL that is reliable. We don’t care about GPS or Bluetooth. I have the Wifi transmitter, that I DO use in the studio. But, when I’m out, I remove it.
The magnesium shell would prevent ANY signal from getting into the body. For those who want to whine that their phones have antennas and such – go take an electronics class. Also, look at your crappy iPhone. It’s plastic. Remember the whole fiasco with the antenna losing signal when it was touched – the antenna was the bezel that trimmed the phone. It had to be outside the case to get a clear signal.
I think the author needs to continue reviewing CONSUMER gear, not pro-level gear. While their at it, they should probably write about how great their next Mac product is too…even though my Fujitsu tablet (which is why I have a Wifi transmitter on my 1Ds) works more reliably and processes images in Lightroom faster…
Hi there Dr!
Thank you very much for your feedback. I’ve used – and owned – 1-series cameras going all the way back to the rather fantastic Canon EOS 1N (HS). That little ‘beaut would rip through a 36-picture film in about 3 seconds. What a fantastic piece of kit that was!
I think you’re guilty of falling into the same trap as I did, though: Just because I think these features should be built-in, doesn’t mean that they necessarily should be – and it sounds like my belief that they should have included these features are as passionate as your beliefs that they shouldn’t be. However, saying that ‘we’ don’t want it sounds unlikely – unless you are the official spokesman for the entire professional photography community?
My point is that if Canon had planned for this right from the start, they could have made a provision for antennae built into the camera body. There are plenty of metal laptops out there, for example, that get excellent WiFi reception without having to resort to external antennae – it’s all part of how you design your hardware. As you say, I’m not an electronical engineer, but as far as I am aware, for the magnesium casing to work as a Faraday cage, it would have to be grounded, which – as far as I can tell – it isn’t, because at no point does the metal of the housing touch the photographer or any other point of ‘ground’. Even if this were the case, they could have used the metal used in the frame as an antenna in several different ways.
Nothing is impossible if you decide to design for it, and I maintain that Canon have made some pretty daft choices. On the other hand, if you’re happy to pay an extra £600 or so, then feel free…
Glad someone is telling it like it is instead of just blindly singing the praises. Corporations are reknown for making their products appeal to the lowest common denominator to get more of the market. Any of those obscure reasons for not including transmitters are not part of the majority market. It’s bald-faced price gouging. I certainly hope some cheap chinese alternatives show up on ebay. I bought two clone battery grips on ebay for my 5DII and my 7D and I haven’t looked back. They were a 5th of the price of the canon ones. I figured if they died, I’d get a new one. Turns out they work even better with more convenient access to the battery compartment.
The strategy of making all their 1Dx customers miss out on basic features for the sake of maybe a few extra $$ is not a good exercise in customer relations. I hope Nikon kicks their arse. I would have switched earlier if it wasn’t for the fact they were so slow to embrace video.