Originally posted by Fat Albert I fired up the GPS yesterday, and I have to say that it's an amazing little tool. I won't always use it, but it's great to have when you're out and about!
However, I noticed that when the camera was off, the orange light on the left side of the prism housing was blinking. None of the other camera functions were operational, so I don't think that this is related to the functionality problems associated with the recall. I did go back into the menus and I turned off the GPS, figuring that if it was anything like my mobile phone, it was a HUGE battery drain. After I did so, the light stopped blinking. Is this normal behavior?
It wouldn't surprise me that the GPS module is kept running at least in some kind of low refresh mode while the camera is nominally off. GPS systems take quite a while to initialise and pick up satellites. If totally inactivated every time the camera was switched off, it would never have time to get a coordinate to write to the image file if you were to switch the camera on and immediately take a shot (as I am sure we all often do). It would be interesting to see if the blue light went out after an extended period of non-use.
I agree though that GPS on phone suck batteries like no tomorrow. However on phones I surmise there are a bunch of apps asking frequently for coordinates in the background which the phone user is quite unaware of and this keeps the GPS module in a high level of activity. On a camera you probably (as the software developer) have more control over how the GPS module is being accessed and will limit its state of activity when the camera is nominally off. At least that would be my thinking if I was doing the engineering.
I would be interested to hear how the K-3 II battery charge held up if you were to have the camera off for an extended period while the GPS function was active.