As you may have noticed, we tend to get all hot and bothered when we see announcements for exciting new products. But when we get an announcement that basically consists of a manufacturer hyping an old product by renaming or “repositioning” it, we just get bothered. Case in point: the “new” Ricoh Pro G3 digital camera. According to a press release sent out by Ricoh on January 18, this is “the world’s first GPS-ready digital camera.” The problem is, not only is it not the first GPS-ready digicam (Kodak had one out ages ago). It’s not even a new camera. As far as we can tell, it’s identical to Ricoh’s Caplio Pro G3, which was released almost a year ago. The Caplio Pro was mentioned in an article we linked to in an item we ran about DIY digicam GPS setups last year, and was also mentioned prominently by our pals at the Digital Photography Weblog back in December. In fact, the helpful link provided in Ricoh’s press release about the camera leads to a page on the site of distributor GeoSpatial Experts that includes an announcement from last April that they’ve got the Caplio Pro G3 (we’ve heard from at least one potential customer who called GeoSpatial that it is indeed the same camera). It’s not that we don’t like the cam; the idea of an off-the-shelf GPS-camera solution is something we dig. We can just do without the hype.

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