Sony GPS-CS1

product

A neat, nicely designed GPS track logger, ideal for photography. Should (but doesn’t yet) play well with Macs, unfortunately.

★★★★☆

Sony GPS-CS1

The Sony GPS-CS1 is a neat GPS track logger designed with photographers in mind. Available for about £75 at amazon.co.uk, $150 rrp elsewhere (but you can find it much cheaper) it’s aimed at people who have simple demands from a GPS device – to track their location into a file that can be viewed or manipulated in different ways from your personal computer – in my case a Core 2 Duo MacBook. Sony has aimed this gadget at photographers, as I mentioned before, with the intention that you can ‘geotag’ your photos with the exact location that they were taken. Windows software included in the box can match the time that the photo was taken against your position at that time in the track log produced by the GPS-CS1, and then write that location into the EXIF headers of the photo file itself, alongside the existing info recorded by most digital cameras such as aperture, exposure etc. This is all also possible on a Mac too, and I’ll cover this briefly later in the review.

As well as using the GPS track log to geotag your photos, you can also convert it into other formats for viewing in applications such as Google Earth or even perform further analysis on the file to work out elements such as average speed or distance travelled over the course of the track. For this I would thoroughly recommend GPS Visualiser, a website that can do pretty much anything with GPS related files and information.

Now, this is a bit of a pre-emptive review, as currently the only way to get the files onto any other Mac than a Core 2 Duo MacBook is to go through a Windows machine first. Not particulary user-friendly, but something I was willing to put up with for the convenience and coolness of using this gadget. However, I struck lucky, as some differences in the latest build of Mac OS 10.4.8 on the latest Core 2 Duo MacBooks mean that thankfully the GPS-CS1 mounts as a read-only drive on my desktop, eliminating the Windows step.

It’s anticipated that the imminent release of 10.4.9 should enable the GPS-CS1 to mount on any Mac, so with that in mind I’m taking that as a given, and ignoring the fact that all other Mac Users currently have no option but to use a Windows machine for now to access the GPS tracks created by the Sony.

So, assuming that that all works out OK in the end, how does the GPS-CS1 function in real world use?

The Basics

The unit is fairly small and unobtrusive, but not dead tiny. Probably as long as an old style iPod Shuffle, and about an inch in diameter, it has a small attachment for a chunky carabiner on one end, and sports a standard (thankfully no proprietry Sony stuff here) USB connection and a data reset penhole under a solid cover just underneath the bar that the cord for the carabiner loops around. At the other end is the battery cover and the status lights which are clean and simple – BATT shows the battery status, and warns you in fairly good time if the AA battery used for power is getting low, and flashes red when the battery has run out. There’s also the GPS indicator light – this flashes once every few seconds. A single flash indicates that the unit has a signal and is writing to the track file. Two flashes in quick succession means that a signal was not acquired at the time the GPS-CS1 was due to write a location into the file. So, it’s possible to look at it for less than 10 seconds and work out if you have a GPS signal or not. Finally, there’s the MEM FULL indicator, which shows if you have used up the 32MB of internal memory. It’s only possible to clear data off the GPS-CS1 by using the pen hole button on the unit, as the drive is read only when connected to a computer.

The GPS receiver is located underneath the small picture of a GPS satellite, which means that when clipped to a bag or similar, the receiver is facing outwards rather than upwards – not a big deal, but if the receiver were at the top of the unit it may improve signal reliability.

In the outside world

GPS signals travel via line of sight, so it’s no surprise that burying the GPS-CS1 in a backpack yields no success in receiving a GPS signal. It also means that at pretty much all times when use, the best way at consistently getting a signal on the GPS-CS1 was to have it attached to the outside of a backpack. Keeping it in a trouser pocket, even with the top exposed, meant an erratic track log. Thankfully the backpack I was using had a convenient mesh pocket on the side that I kept the unit clipped to, which worked a treat.

I tested the GPS-CS1 for several days in two different environments – in the outdoors for several days when skiing in the Italian Dolomites, and in the GPS nightmare of the small side streets of Venice. You can download or view both logs further down the page and see for yourself the accuracy of the GPS-CS1/

The logs themselves are fairly accurate, and rarely deviated from the actual course I took. Some exceptions were clear though – anytime that I was not out in the open, say riding on a ski cable car on a boat with a covered roof, meant slightly more erratic logs, as can be seen in the examples below. Linking your photos to a point which ended up being erratic kind of defeats the point of the device, but it’s viewing your photos on a map quickly makes it clear when something may have gone a bit wrong.

The battery life was acceptable – in the cold of the mountains I got a full days skiing out of a new, good quality AA. In Venice where it was a touch warmer, they lasted a little longer.

Back on your Mac

Assuming the GPS-CS1 mounts on your desktop OK (see the caveat at the beginning of the review), you will see a read only drive called ‘NO NAME’. A bummer if you like customising drive names or icons, as it’s read only these are not changeable. From here you drill through a folder called GPS and see the track logs themselves. A full day’s skiing came out at just over 500KB – so assuming this was about 8 hours, it would take maybe 64 hours of tracking to fill the GPS-CS1 up.

Mounted on the desktop

Log file info

The logs themselves are in a standard NMEA format (good news) which is easily convertable into GPX for use by other programs, or KML to view in Google Earth. I’d recommend GPS Visualiser for this, or GPSBabel if you don’t have internet access when processing the files. For further geotagging or viewing I’d thoroughly recommend GPSPhotoLinker for the Mac as Sony do not provide mac compatible software with the GPS-CS1, but the scope and operation of this app is way beyond what I can cover in this review. It’s a great program and dead easy to use, so just try it out! GPSPhotoLinker requires the files from the GPS-CS1 to be in GPX format, which takes all of about 2 seconds in GPSBabel or on the GPS Visualiser website.

Conclusion

I’m really happy with the GPS-CS1, especially as it works on my MacBook. Having to pass files through Windows would be a huge pain, so I’m hoping that OS 10.4.9 will sort that out for other Apple users. The accuracy of the track logs is good enough for me by far, and the fact that this is truly a set and forget device (until the battery runs out, at least) is a real breath of fresh air.

Improvements – well, a better battery status indicator would be good – you can’t see how much life is left in your AA. Putting the GPS antenna in a more logical place on the top of the unit would also make some sense, but I can understand why it is where it is, and it hasn’t affected the track logs too adversely.

Finally, what’s really the point in logging your location? Is it metadata overkill? Try downloading the Ski kml file below, generated from a track log from the GPS-CS1 and click play in Google Earth. Seeing my days skiing flash by me was truly very cool. Also, knowing that in future I can look back at my photos and I won’t be thinking “Where was that taken?”, as I’ll know – just see my map on Flickr!

Track Downloads

Skiing in the Italian Dolomites

1. Raw Track File
2. Converted to KML for Google Earth

Urban environment, Venice

1. Raw Track File
2. Converted to KML for Google Earth