Canon PowerShot G10: high end and compact and very, very good
Canon PowerShot G10 is on sale at assorted prices but something around US$500-plus would be a good price. So it is affordable but not at the disposable end of the market.
This is an amazing performer. Totally astounding. I have seen shots I would have sworn came from a Hasselblad. That good.
As well, it looks stylish, Although there is nothing a top photographer could not do it is easy to use and the quality of the pictures is staggering. They leave you gobstruck.
If I was not already extremely content with my machine — purposely not mentioned — I would be at this like a starving dingo at a dead rabbit. It really is that good.
The G10 is a bit bigger than the G9 and weighs 350g without battery and card. Which means you can use it all day without being tired.
There is a 5x optical zoom with a 6.1-30.5mm f/2.8-f/4.5 lens — equivalent to 28-140mm on a 35mm camera. That is the area where great pictures are shot.
Forget long zooms.
Forget all the suss promises made elsewhere.
If you are shooting between 28 and 140 mm and keeping mostly to the wide end you are probably never going to get it wrong.
The G10 has 14.7 megapixels which is the sort of gubbins the marketing department — the ones with suits and ties — love but it is all a bit pointless and fraught with potential problems.
In theory you could get all sorts of noise problems with that many megapixels crammed in. But Canon claims that its DIGIC 4 image processor really does keep noise levels down. But, then, they would say that, wouldn’t they? The results I saw shook me rigid. I do not think there is any problem in this area.
This is not a camera to pick up and start shooting.
Although you could do that, you can also control every facet of your picture taking with buttons and dials with which you should practice a lot.
I am not going to make a list. Life is too short. But everything you want to control is there.
At the right side is a flap covering a mini USB port and, at the bottom, a compartment for the lithium-ion battery and SD/SDHC/MMC card.
It shoots JPEG and RAW (CR2 format) images with a top resolution of 4416 x 3312 pixels. The ISO range is 80-1600, with an optional 3200 setting for reducing motion blur. The shutter speed range is 15-1/4000 sec and the G10 also shoots movies but we can ignore that for the time being. If I am going to shoot video I take a video camera. The stuff I have seen off this camera is not good. Indeed, bad. Do not use it for video. Video on a still camera is gubbins.
The continuous shooting mode has a top speed of just 0.7f/s in AF mode which is not fast, not fast at all. If you want a camera for shooting fast-action shots this is not, please believe me, for you.
When it comes to the gubbins it, of course, has it all. There are lots of shooting modes to select from: auto, program AE, shutter priority, aperture priority, manual, panoramic and a dozen scene modes — including portrait, night scene, foliage and snow — along with various My Colour photo effects, such as sepia and black and white. There’s also a handy integrated ND filter, image stabilization, face detection, red-eye correction, plus ‘iContrast’, which is designed to boost detail in dark areas – it’s available in both shooting and playback modes.
I am sure you would get used to all of that. I am not sure I would want to.
The one acid test is can it take great pictures. Yes it can. Superb. Wonderful. And so on. If I was not already securely wed to the camera I use — no names, no pack drill — I would be tempted except for that speed of recycling. It really needs a lot of word.
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