A Week with the Canon G10:
Day 1

A friend and fellow photographer, as well as all around awesome guy, let me borrow his shiny new nearly right out of the box toy, a Canon PowerShot G10, for a week or so, so I could review it for Points in Focus. So under that guise, I’ve decided to put down my SLR for a week and take up the G10 to see what I can do with it. Spec wise it’s pretty impressive, 14.7 megapixels, a 28-140mm equivalent (6.1-30.5mm) f/2.5-4.5 lens, image stabilization, RAW, a hot shoe for any of Canon’s EX series Speedlites, and the list goes on.

I’m not much of a fan of point and shoots; I don’t care for the compromises in image quality of small dense sensors or for the ergonomics of working by looking at an LCD instead of through a viewfinder. The G10 is not much different, above ISO400 images are obscenely noisy, enough so that Lightroom can’t correct for them on its own, and that makes almost half of the available ISO range useless. This is compounded by the f/4.5 lens at longer zooms and the anemic built in flash.

That said, so far it seems that at lower ISOs the images are very nice, mostly noise free at least up to about ISO 200. The big RAW files are nice, I’m finding that even when I crop I’m cropping files down to 8 to 10 MP instead of 4-5. How that really compares with a 8-10 MP file from an SLR with pro glass I’m not sure of, though obviously the SLR will have shallower depth of field than the G10 will. Then again, where it really falls down is in poor light. I can salvage a ISO1600 shot off my 40D, I can’t really say the same for an ISO 800 frame from the G10, at least not with out expanding my current workflow to include some seriously high power noise reduction software.

What I have found, is that I’m far more likely to carry the G10 than I would my whole SLR kit. Do I think a P&S will replace my SLR kit? Not a chance, but the ability to have one for when I want to go somewhere and hot drag the SLR is a big boon. Its also a lot more discrete than an SLR and therefore potentially more useful for street photography. Ultimately, though, I think that niche will be dominated by the Micro 4/3rds system. With the larger 4/3rds sensor (and thus better low light performance) and the availability of fast compact lenses it’s going to be the real boon for street photographers. In fact, I wouldn’t be adverse to Canon jumping on the micro 4/3rds bandwagon and moving the G10′s successor to that, I certainly would be interested in one.

So far I haven’t really gotten out and shot a lot, tonight’s sunset has been the first real experiment. I also played around with flying the G10 as a pole cam on my monopod; it’s a whole lot lighter than flying a Canon rebel, though typically I fly a 10-22 at 10mm on the pole cam, so the G10 is quite a bit tighter but it’s also quite a bit lighter and can be flown with one hand.

At first look, I’m very impressed with this camera, at least for what it is, and will continue to share my experiences and thoughts as the week progresses.