A Week with the Canon G10:
Day 3

Yesterday I shot another sunset with the G10, this time shooting some video as well as 14.7 MP RAW stills. In doing so I found one of my first major complaints with the G10′s video mode, specifically video is processed in full auto exposure, with no exposure lock. Much to my chagrin, in the fleeting moments of the sunset, with the sun rapidly disappearing below the horizon and the light levels dropping quickly and noticeably, the G10 was pushing the exposure up. To make things worse,  it was doing it in very noticeable steps. The video would suddenly get much brighter, and them dim slowly as the sun continued to set. While I see the utility of this for casual users shooting video, I can’t say I was pleased with this or the fact that you can’t stop the camera from doing it.

Correction 4-12-09: End user error, is the order of the day. I hate how that always happens at the worst possible moments. You can in fact lock the exposure on the G10 in video mode. To do so you simply have to press the exposure lock button and the camera will keep the exposure it metered when you started. The second complaint is accurate though, gradual changes in light, at least under the conditions I shot the video in, will result in visible jumps in exposure. That being said, the video quality, even in low light, at least when shot intelligently, is very good for a non high-def camera.

Tangentially, one thing that completely baffles me is that the camera locks the max shutter speed down to 1/2500th from 1/4000th when the focal length is increased (i.e. the lens is zoomed in). I have no idea why the shutter would be effected by that, but apparently it is. Also I ran into a bit of an annoying problem with flash sync speeds, specifically with my 580Ex II attached and the camera in manual I could set a shutter speed in excess of the x-sync speed of 1/250th, but when making the actual exposure the shutter speed used was the x-sync speed of 1/250th. This is very different from my experience on SLRs, where unless the flash is set to use high speed/focal plane sync, the shutter speed is limited to the sync speed. This lead to me being rather baffled as to what was going on while trying to shoot flash-as-primary light outside in broad daylight.

Addendum: The G10 is capable of syncing at up to 1/500th of a second with the internal flash. However, when used with an EX series Speedlite in the hot shoe, the sync speed is limited to 1/250th unless the flash is placed into high speed sync mode.

Again, I was carrying with me all the time, and shooting anything and everything that struck my fancy, in this case I was pushing the camera into places I don’t usually take my SLR, while trying to take advantage of the greater depth of field the much smaller sensor offers. The above image is water droplets formed on the back of my car’s silver trunk lid, the blue comes from the paint and water reflecting the sky, as well as the inherently cool white balance the G10 decided was warranted. The depth of field certainly was greater than what I would have had, had I shot this with my SLR, but  not quite as deep as I was expecting.

The above shot was also done using the camera’s manual focus mode, and the manual focus magnification feature. I used this mostly because focus bracketing is only available in manual focus mode, and I was hoping to cover my depth of field bases. One thing I found quite difficult though was actually focusing using the manual focus mode. The shadowy edges of the drops from quite hard lines, but with the adjustment of focus being done by scrolling the dial on the rear of the camera, it didn’t seem nearly as precise as the focus ring on an SLR lens. That being said, after going back and forth past the point of best focus a couple of times, it becomes more clear where you should have stopped. One thing that was annoying is that the manual focus magnification system uses the location of the AF focus frame to place itself, and you can’t move the AF frame while the camera is in manual focus mode. Therefore, adjusting the position of the manual focus magnification require dropping out of manual focus mode, moving the AF frame, and re-entering manual focus mode.

So far, while I’ve been enjoying the G10 as a supplement to my regular SLR, and it’s certainly handy to carry around it’s definitely not with out it’s compromises. While I find the image quality to be quite acceptable for many things, I’m often left feeling that some things are a bit soft or at least less sharp than I’m use to. Also so far I’ve avoided using ISOs higher than 400. I’ve found there is noise at pretty much all ISOs, thanks to Canon cramming 14.7 million pixels in a tiny P&S sized sensor, but they are quite manageable in Lightroom alone. On the other hand above ISO 400, the image quality degrades into a noisy mess that is virtually impossible to clean up acceptably in Lightroom. The noise at high ISOs is also dominated by chroma noise, which is more distracting and less tolerable than luminance noise. The one image I shot at ISO 1600 filled virtually all of the black areas with speckled blue noise.