Canon Powershot G10 14.7MP Digital Camera with 5x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom by Canon
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Digital camera reviews of Canon Powershot G10 14.7MP Digital Camera with 5x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
Digital camera Review: A decent compact digital camera
Summary: 3 Stars
A tool can be rated as to how well it lets you accomplish your task with a desired result.
NOTE that in the description quoted from Digital Photography Review in Amazon's write-up, DPR's "Image Quality" rating of only "8" was OMITTED (!) as was the "Overall Rating," which was "Recommended" instead of "Highly Recommended."
What a coincidence! Amazon just omits things that do not suit them.
Digital Photography Review was NOT overwhelmed by the G10's performance. Perhaps because using ISOs over 200 results in too much noise. Perhaps because subjects with less than great contrast tend to produce softer images. Maybe because using f/stop numbers higher than 5 tend to soften images a bit because of "diffraction." I also own a Canon G6 (7 MP). It has a "pixel density" of 19 MP/cm2. The G10 has a whopping pixel density of 34 MP/cm2. My old Canon 5D DSLR has a pixel density of 1.5 MP/cm2. As you may know, high pixel density is a detriment to capturing great images.
I purchased the G10 as a "grab-and-go-backup" for when I didn't feel like "shlepping" all of my DSLR gear ... I also purchased (and reviewed on Amazon) the nice Canon A650 IS.
The bottom line is that VERY FEW compact digital cameras will produce images even close to DSLRs - your grab-and-go image will ALMOST ALWAYS be imperfect if you are a stickler.
SO, why take any small camera with you that will produce lesser images- you'll smack your forehead and say "I could have taken my DSLR!" just like in the V8 commercial. BUT, if you simply MUST take a small camera, why not take a small camera that costs less than the G10? Like the Canon A650 IS, still findable on the internet for less than on Amazon.
Yes the G10 has some very ergonomic controls and is flexible,
although it is not "pocketable."
Yes it has a very nice LCD screen. And if all you've ever taken pictures with are Canon's Elph digicams, the G10 will be a big step up.
If all you take are images that will be 6 x 4 inch prints, this G10 camera will do the job (though you can get cheaper and LIGHTER
digicams to do that job). Even 8 x 10s will be OK much of the time with the G10. With a tripod, even larger prints are do-able
with reasonable quality.
I have a big bunch blue ribbons for photography from camera clubs, juried exhibitions (and sales), and galleries.
Only ONE of all of those blue ribbons was awarded to me for an
image that came came from a compact digicam. That ONE came from the Canon G6.
SO, as far as the G10 being a REAL DSLR backup? .... maybe not so much. Given the choice, you'll always take the DSLR if the image quality matters to you. That leaves the G10 in the drawer.
BAD camera? NO. GREAT camera? NO.
Digital camera Review: A great in-between camera
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm a hobbyist who long ago owned a Konica SLR and shot lots of slides. In the digital age, I've only owned point-and-shoot cameras and have become frustrated by their lack of flexibility and quality. I looked long and hard at SLRs but don't yet feel I can spring for the price. I also wanted something more easily portable. But I wanted complete control over shutter speed and aperture, and I wanted to be able to shoot in RAW for more post-processing flexibility. I decided to spring for the G10.
Since purchasing this camera about a week ago, I've taken about 2,000 shots. (I went a little nuts!) Here's what I've learned so far:
-- Although the auto settings produced very good pictures, this camera really comes into its own when you shoot in Manual mode. I was able to routinely get some vivid fall sunset scenes on a lake with beautifully saturated color and contrast by tweaking shutter speed and aperture settings separately.
-- I'd say that the noise at 400+ without post-tweaking is considerable, though nowhere near what I used to see on 400 ISO film back in the day. It was easily reduced post-processing using a noise-reduction program that works within Photoshop, and I ended up with some beautiful indoor shots with minimal effort. I even took some night landscape pictures with a bright moon at 1600, and was pleasantly surprised at the results after tweaking them afterward.
-- I was able to get extremely sharp photos in macro mode (closeups of bees in flowers, that kind of thing), again without a tripod. I'm still getting the hang of focusing on the exact part of the flower that I want; I find it more cumbersome to do it with this camera than I did with my old SLR (where you just turned the lens with your hand).
-- The camera did a good job out of the box at face recognition. The built-in flash on auto settings was just OK; it didn't hideously over-expose the faces, but it didn't look entirely natural either. Again, moving away from the auto settings and using fill flash judiciously helped me create some much more natural and attractive portraits. I would imagine adding a separate flash attachment would help even more. I found my favorite portraits were taken with no flash at all and some light tweaking with contrast in Photoshop.
-- The optical zoom met my needs well. I loved having the wide-angle capability for landscape shots, and I got some gorgeous, very clear pictures of a bald eagle at the top of a tree with the telephoto zoom. The camera clearly showed me when I was moving beyond the optical zoom into digital zoom, and my pictures of the eagle deteriorated accordingly. I will probably turn off the digital zoom.
-- The camera comes with all kinds of built-in scene settings (snow, night snapshots, sunsets, underwater, etc.), most of which I haven't yet found that helpful. I did get a couple of fun foliage shots using the sunset and foliage settings, but in both cases I could've gotten the same results simply tweaking in Photoshop afterward. If you don't want to mess with post-processing programs or playing with the camera's controls, I could see how these scene settings could be useful.
-- Photoshop CS3 can't open the RAW files from this camera yet. This is a big drawback for my purposes. I have opened the RAW files in the Canon software that comes with the camera, but it's not nearly as powerful or intuitive as Photoshop. So for now, I'm exporting the RAW files to Photoshop as TIFFs, and they're enormous -- 85 MG. The quality is marvelous, however, and I'm hoping that Adobe will quickly add support for the G10.
I'll try to add some photo examples to this review. I noticed they get a little washed out when saved for the web; the originals are much more vivid.
As point-and-shoots go, this is about as good as it gets for my purposes. I gave it five stars, though I'd like to give it a half-star demerit for the lack of RAW support in Photoshop (a problem I hope will soon be corrected). If you're not quite ready for the leap to an SLR but you want more control and quality than the common point-and-shoot camera, this is an outstanding choice.
Digital camera Review: A short and simple review
Summary: 5 Stars
For people like me who love to take great looking pictures but know next to nothing about photography this is the camera to get. The macro feature is excellent and the zoom is pretty good too. I post my pictures to facebook regularly and get lots of compliments....thanks to the G10.Digital camera Review: A very pleasant surprise and upgrade from the G7
Summary: 5 Stars
MY MOVE FROM THE G7 to the G10.
I own and really like the Canon G7. I passed on purchasing the G9, not seeing much that would attract me over the G7. But as I read about the G10, I began to see enough new stuff to make it sound interesting to me. Little did I guess what a huge leap up this purchase was going to be.
I'll try to focus here on items you may not have read about in the reviews below, or at least items that may not have been covered in any detail.
Overall, the feel and build of the G10 is simply great. Nothing about it feels flimsy or cheap to me. It has a bigger grip on the right front where your fingers wrap around the camera and the camera is a delight to hold and use.
The LCD is now 3" of course, and much sharper and crisper than my G7. The G10 still uses my SD and SD HC (SD High Capacity) cards and I am happy about that.
I wanted to test the new "I-Contrast" feature I had been hearing about, so I sat my wife in the bay window with a fully sunlit window behind her. I took a series of photographs from several feet away, focusing (with face detect) on her face.
With the test shots where I had "I-Contrast" turned off, her face was visible but pretty dark as were the interior walls around the window behind her. Not an unusable picture, but certainly not a good picture either. I was surprised they were as good as they were but I still wanted better than this.
So I enabled "I-Contrast" and shot the same scene. The results were a very pleasant surprise. The outside scene through the window was still slightly overblown ... almost exactly as in the first series. But my wife's face and the interior walls were now much more properly exposed and the pictures were truly usable ... something most of us would be happy to have taken. It was clear that "I-Contrast" really does work and since it is easy (using the camera menu) to engage "I-Contrast" I will certainly be using that feature often in contrasty scenes where I want to avoid harsh black shadows.
I was quite impressed with the quality of this new lens. I thought I had a sharp crisp lens on my G7 but the lens on my G10 is a definite step up. Or maybe it is the additional pixels ... whatever, the difference is remarkable and was totally unexpected.
I was a bit concerned about the loss of Optical zoom range from the zoom range available with my G7. I never used digital zoom on the G7 because it was too easy to lose picture quality and I didn't want to risk that. But I had read about a new feature of the G10 where it if you set the digital zoom to "standard", the camera would combine Optical and Digital zoom and allow you to seamlessly use them together up to a point just shy of where picture degradation would begin. Then it would stop zooming. If you then tried to zoom some more, the G10 will allow that but you will then be digital zooming into the range where there is a risk of picture degradation. All very clever I thought, but did it actually work?
I decided to test that. I sat the camera on a block wall and shot the street sign across the intersection (about 150 feet). As I expected, when I zoomed in the zoom ran seamlessly to what appeared to be maximum and stopped. I took the picture. Then I twisted the zoom button again and sure enough, the zoom continued zooming (into the possible degradation zone) to the true maximum zoom using not only all optical capability but ALL digital capability.
I fired up my computer and loaded the first shot ... the "standard" zoom. Taken at 14.7 Mega Pixels, I was immediately stunned by the quality of the shot. It wasn't just good, it was simply flawless! There was absolutely nothing about that shot that I wanted to improve except, perhaps, it still didn't bring the street sign all that close. So, using my photo editor, I just kept zooming in on the street sign until it virtually filled my monitor ... and the image was STILL FLAWLESS! I simply couldn't believe my eyes. Color was perfect, edges of the lettering were crisp and absolutely sharp. There was nothing for me to improve in a photo editor. I was stunned. (I may have even laughed out loud). Even the leaves of the mesquite tree in my neighbor's yard which is some 20 feet behind the sign were all visible and definable. WOW! WOW! WOW!
Then I loaded the next shot where I had zoomed the G10 out until it paused, then zoomed more to push the combination of Optical and Digital zoom to the absolute limit. To keep it short: It was about as good as I was used to getting from my G7 using Optical zoom only ... which is OK, but not truly sharp, crisp and the green color of the sign looked somewhat faded. Also the tree leaves in the background were no longer distinct ... Again this is not a picture you'd throw away by any means and one which could be improved with some work in Photoshop but even with that effort, it would be nothing near the quality I could get with the G10s method of combining Optical and just the right amount of Digital zoom. And the G10 gave it to me without any additional effort whatsoever.
My future approach to photography of distant objects in the future was immediately obvious. I will use the G10's built in magic (as I did in the first zoom shot) and then simply crop and enlarge the crop to the size I want for flawless, effortless results.
As I said, I skipped the G9 so I cannot compare the G9 and the G10, but I couldn't be happier with my decision to upgrade my G7 to the G10. The G10 clearly takes this type of photography to a new level with features, a great lens and picture quality.
For several years, I actually had a $6,500 setup including the Canon Mark II and some "L" glass lenses. It was heavy, cumbersome and took pictures which, as expected, cried out for work in Photoshop. Professional cameras produce pictures that expect the photographer to work on them. While I enjoyed fiddling with the pictures from the Mark II, I eventually tired of that weight, bulk and switching lenses so I gave the camera to my son. Now, that I have this G10, I will never look back.
I guess I will need Photoshop again if I try to take pictures in the dark with the G10, it does have a bit more noise at higher ISOs. And if you are a true pro, you will probably rant and rave about noise at higher ISOs I suppose.
For the rest of us, the pictures up to ISO 400 are quite acceptable and if are really picky, noise removal is simple enough to accomplish with Photoshop or any other software capable of noise reduction. In real life, I guess I don't shoot much where I use ISOs beyond 400 anyway.
I have owned cameras all my life and I have never owned a camera I liked more than this G10, or from which I got better pictures right out of the camera than this G10. This camera is Worth every penny to me.
Digital camera Review: Absolutely stunning results, easy use and feature set
Summary: 5 Stars
I've never written an Amazon review for any product before, but I feel that Canon has done such a superb job with the G10 that they deserve some kind words.
I am the former Color Editor at Popular Photography Magazine. I normally use a digital SLR, but I wanted a smaller, simpler camera for use in taking photos from an aircraft. I needed a camera that I could hold securely in one hand while flying the aircraft with the other. I have a Canon Elf, but it's almost impossible to hold the camera in one hand as it's just too small.
I guess I bought the G10 for its grip-ability. I assumed it would take reasonably good photos because I've always been happy with the digital Elf, but I was unprepared for how good it is. If you're a serious amateur or a pro, you will be more than happy with the photographs the G10 produces. The results are stunning. The feature set is just as good. Your every need has been anticipated and a control positioned closely at hand. Easy ISO setting, exposure compensation, and control of flash output for sync-sun shooting are all easily at hand. There are even two custom settings that allow you to pre-program the features you'll need for special applications. I use one which sets the shutter speed at shutter priority at 1/1000 sec. and the focus pre-set at infinity for air to ground photography. I use a the second custom setting with the shutter priority set at 1/100 sec for taking photos that include the spinning propeller. High shutter speeds freeze the prop making it look as if the engine has stopped. I programmed it so it also kicks in the neutral density filter and again the focus set at infinity.
Frankly, the results from the G10 are so good, that if I didn't have such a large investment in another brand of Digital SLR lenses, I would switch to Canon SLR's because of the G10. It's always the lenses, not the bodies that keep you with a particular brand of camera.
I could go on and on telling you how wonderful the G10 is and how much it's like a digital Leica, but I think you already get the idea. Just go buy one!