Canon's G10, SX1 IS, and more get the hands-on treatment

We already caught of preview of Canon new EOS 5D Mark II 21-megapixel monster, but if you're curious about Canon's other new camera offerings, you may want to hit up Photography Blog, which has gone hands-on with each of 'em. That includes the PowerShot G10 (pictured above), the PowerShot SX1 IS / SX10 IS, the Digital IXUS 980 IS and 870 IS and, of course, the aforementioned EOS 5D Mark II, just in case you need another look at it. Unfortunately, they don't have much in the way of first impressions just yet, or any sample shots, but they do at least have a comparison between the G10 and the earlier G9 model for those considering an upgrade, and plenty of high res photos of each camera to let you examine every nook and cranny. Hit up the links below to dig in.

Read - Photography Blog, "Canon PowerShot G10"
Read - Photography Blog, "Canon PowerShot SX1 IS / SX10 IS"
Read - Photography Blog, "Canon Digital IXUS 980 IS and 870 IS"
Read - Photography Blog, "Canon EOS 5D Mark II"

[kle0012 @ Sep 17th 2008 4:56PM]

That's a rather nostalgic design on Cannon's behalf...

[cesium @ Sep 17th 2008 5:04PM]

You mean 880 IS, not 870 IS

[LloydChiro @ Sep 17th 2008 5:10PM]

That camera would be bad-ass if it had a 4/3 or greater sensor.

[Todd @ Sep 18th 2008 9:20AM]

You're right a larger sensor for useful high ISO images. I can't wait (fast forward a couple of years) until the top-of-the line cameras like this come with DSLR like sensors. Would meet 90% of my photography needs. I'd be willing to pay a premium for this to not have to lug around SLR. As it is now, I'm using my G9 for most of my photos and just wish that ISOs other than 100 were useful for anything other than converting to B&W.

[cmil1212 @ Sep 17th 2008 5:12PM]

I've heard that this is the last of the G series. Good. They've just about ruined it after the G6 but had made up for it some with the G9. This pixels race was stupid and disappointing. I won't even consider the G10. 15MP...geez..why canon..why?

[PCIV @ Sep 17th 2008 5:15PM]

Personally, using a G6, I love it. One problem... ISO maxes at 400, and my hand shakes with the lack of VR... Any tips on using it?

[Lowest Ranked @ Sep 17th 2008 5:25PM]

Tripod. Look into it.

[KarlW @ Sep 17th 2008 8:40PM]

I'm really thinking about getting this. Yes, Canon succumbed to the MP race and squeezed more out of it than the CCD deserved. It's still a pretty good power compact, great for spontaneous shots, and some great conversion lenses for less-spontaneous stuff.

Well, the G9 was at least. I'm hoping this is just more of the same. The 28mm lens already makes this hard to resist.

[KorruptioN @ Sep 18th 2008 9:31AM]

Fortunately the G6 at ISO400 is actually usable. Sure the noise and grain start to get annoying, but detail retention is surprisingly good. I love my G6.

[Kimleng @ Sep 17th 2008 5:13PM]

I like how the G10 retains an underused feature of the G9:

Manual
-----------

Thanks for being a new owner of this super awesome Canon camera with way too many megapixels for the CCD size.

Did you know...
Your new G10 has the ability to cause blunt force trauma to fanboys by smacking them upside the head with the camera? You can select two levels of pain.

1. Lens extended mode - This mode will puncture your subject when enabled and used with enough thrust
2. Lens retracted mode - Use this mode if you are feeling kind as it will not leave holes in your victim

[Eugenia Loli-Queru @ Sep 17th 2008 5:20PM]

If this G10 camera had the 1080p recording at NTSC 29.97 fps (rather than 30.00), a good mic or maybe a mic-input, along with exposure/focus bracketing (features found on the SX1 IS and 5D-MII only), I would be all over it.

[Lowest Ranked @ Sep 17th 2008 5:28PM]

The troll is back.

No. I don't mean internet troll.

[scott @ Sep 17th 2008 5:27PM]

Man....I think the new 5D is cool and all but really lacking in the innovation department. An integrated speaker and a mic? In an SLR? Garbage.

Scott
http://www.scottnmcnamara.com

[White @ Sep 17th 2008 5:31PM]

aren't you in the wrong thread?

[Celebrity Poker @ Sep 22nd 2008 12:07PM]

I owned a G( for a couple of days and exchanged it for an 870... the manual stuff was cool, but the trade off for portability vs. picture quality didn't work out in the camera's favor. Basically, image quality was not noticeably better than my old digital elf, and obviously didn't approach my Rebel. I couldn't really understand the point - they should just build full manual control into the a regular ELF body.

[Justin Turner @ Sep 17th 2008 5:53PM]

Someone already mentioned this problem, but you reference the 990 and 880 link with the words "980 and 870" and the read link does as well, so I don't think there is any 990 or 880 info on this page for those of us who were interested.

[Andrew Peter Chobaniuk @ Sep 17th 2008 7:01PM]

Interesting... I got a G7 about a month before the G9 came out, might be looking to upgrade to the G10, grab a circular flash and stuff. well some of you bash the specs of the camera, can the portability of it compare to other camera's? i mean this fits in my pocket...

is there another pocket sized camera thats better?

[Olivier @ Sep 17th 2008 7:16PM]

The Nikon P6000 has almost feature to feature the specs of this camera. You may also liek the Panasonic Lumix LX3 but fromwhat I've read the image quality is so-so despite amazing lens (f2 and 24mm).

I am personally thinking about the G10 although since this would be my holiday camera I would be quite interestd in the GPS feature of the p6000 should it have comparable image quality. At the moment there aren't any sample pictures for either camera.

[Olivier @ Sep 17th 2008 7:17PM]

The Nikon P6000 has almost feature to feature the specs of this camera. You may also liek the Panasonic Lumix LX3 but fromwhat I've read the image quality is so-so despite amazing lens (f2 and 24mm).

I am personally thinking about the G10 although since this would be my holiday camera I would be quite interestd in the GPS feature of the p6000 should it have comparable image quality. At the moment there aren't any sample pictures for either camera.

[xValentine @ Sep 17th 2008 10:18PM]

Hey Oliver, what should I get, the P6000 or the G10 ?

[Bad Beaver @ Sep 18th 2008 4:49AM]

The Nikon has that MS Vista-only RAW format, if I remember correctly. That made for a quick decision on my end. The LX-3 pictures I've seen were pretty nice, actually. People also do amazing stuff with the Ricoh GX-200, sadly it only goes to about ISO 200 before things get messy.

[dbacon @ Sep 17th 2008 11:25PM]

Great stuff... The 5x optical zoom is lacking but 15 million pixels should make up for it? Every iteration from Canon has been an improvement. I had an XT and now an XTi and when comparing imagery could see significant differences. Having something like this as a carry everywhere camera would be great. Manual controls are so very important.

[CrashingtehWarehouse @ Sep 18th 2008 9:33AM]

Yeah, I currently have a G9 and really couldn't ask for more, but now seeing the G10, I have manual control envy. Not too much of it though.

[kadajawi @ Sep 17th 2008 6:47PM]

Damn, I'm looking with envy on that ISO selection ring on the G10... wish my DSLR had that.

[Madoc @ Sep 17th 2008 7:11PM]

did someone sneeze on the camera? what is that residue on the top?

[RK @ Sep 17th 2008 9:14PM]

That is only ugly looking camera for year 2008. There is a good reason all "retro" things are "retro" - because we move on to better designs.

[ZUrlocker @ Sep 18th 2008 5:19AM]

I have a G9 which I use for a lot of live music concert photography and short videos. It's a good camera, but in low-light situations, there's a lot of noise. Also, the shutter lag time is slow for action shots or just getting the right facial expressions etc. So I shoot a lot of photos and delete all but the best. Still it's compact and can easily be brought into places where a full-size DSLR wouldn't be practical (or allowed.)

You can see some samples of G9 photos and videos here:
http://www.guitarvibe.com/2008/04/best-gig-photos.html

While the G10 looks promising, my concerns are:
-Will the quality in low-light be better? (less noise?)
-Will the shutter speed / lag be faster?
-Will the improvement in MP count offset the reduction of the zoom?
(The G9 was 6x optical 35-210mm, whereas the G10 is 5x 28-140mm. For what I do, I need more zoom not more wide angle!)
-Is it any lighter or smaller? (doubtful)


Any speculation from photography gurus on how to interpret the news?

Thanks

--Zack
http://www.guitarvibe.com

[SomeBloke @ Sep 21st 2008 12:31PM]

I had a G9 and it was a good 'little' camera but the resolution annoyed me. I used to downsize the RAWs to 3mp from 12 and the images were much better but still not perfect quality. sRAW would have been brilliant actually but now we have 15mp?!!! and still no sRAW, this is insane!! Typical marketing scum driven specification for idiots who don't know how pixels work. Hands up who thinks that 15mp was a good idea, go on, I dare you =P

Oh the wider lens was a nice touch but this camera model is stale now, it's crying out for a bigger sensor. Please Canon, or whoever... Larger sensor with less pixels in a point and shoot!!

[daniel valdez @ Sep 19th 2008 11:16PM]

Are we sure there is no sRAW support in the G10? Does not compute. That is absolutely needed with a 14m sensor. Blah!

[Ed Sejud @ Sep 22nd 2008 7:44PM]

Being fpr the moment one of those "idiots" myself who doesn't understand how pixels work, can you recommend some written resource on the internet where I could go to better inform myself on the subject? Everybody's talking about pixel overkill, so it must be true, but I don't understand why you can't avoid the problem by just shooting at lower resolution.

[Eric @ Sep 18th 2008 10:53AM]

That Photography Blog isn't a hands-on review, it's a regurgitation of a press release.

There is no way the images from the camera will be low-noise as the press release claims. It's physically impossible at this stage of the game.

Canon engineers are even going public (sort of) with their complaints about the marketing department driving up megapixels to the detriment of actually producing better photos. Their questionable claims of being able to blow away the competition is probably them just wishing they could take a wack at making better photos rather than better press releases with willy measuring contest about who's is bigger.

[SomeBloke @ Sep 22nd 2008 10:17AM]

I have not seen any written resources on pixel quality. The opinions I expressed about mega pixels are mostly from my own findings after owning various digital cameras. It helps to be able to processes these images yourself from RAW* files but there are a lot of resources floating around on the internet for you to find high quality images. Review sites such as DPReview are very good, Flickr can be very useful and even sites like PBase but manufacturers samples often don't tell you a lot as they are often studio lit and thus don't reflect the quality that a normal user can achieve.

*I say RAW files because I don't trust compressed files that come out of any camera. These jpgs are often sharpened, saturated, reduced for noise, colour corrected and then spat out at a highly compressed 8bit image. The images I produce always need some kind of work done to them so if I were to use jpgs for capture then I would be compressing it twice thus loosing even more detail than the base 8bit file. RAW files are 12-16bit which means their exposure value can be tweaked in software to retain highlight and shadow detail. White balance can be altered without loosing any detail and sharpening can be done properly with on an image by image basis depending on what you decide something needs rather than by a set amount, as can saturation and all before dropping to a perfect 8bit file for displaying on the web or whatever.

Camera's with small sensors and huge amounts of mega-pixels are unable to make high quality images because the sensor for each pixel is now so small that it's difficult to get reliable light levels in them without huge amounts of signal to noise ratio. Manufacturers like to push the mega-pixels of these tiny sensor machines to make them sound better than what they are. of course you can capture less in lossy jpg format but not in RAW. That is until Canon invented the sRAW (I assume 'Small RAW') file type which usually divided the amount of pixels captured by the RAW by 4 (2.5mp instead of 10mp). This was done because only 1 in 4 pixels is a red or blue and so dividing this way could keep the alias matrix the same and in theory improve your image quality through a higher signal to noise ratio. This would also save on file size which is all good.

[Heidi @ Oct 7th 2008 12:46PM]

Just got word from a customer (Christopher) that the zoom camera case is a nice snug fit for the G10. http://www.sfbags.com/products/cameracase/cameracase.htm

(P.S. I agree--loved the ELF until mine was stolen....)

[drew @ Nov 24th 2008 1:44AM]

i just got the G10, had gotten tired of toting the older 20D and accesories around and it was collecting alot of dust in favor of my lumix tz-3. The camera is very nice and has that heft that a camera of this caliber should have. the view screen is the best ive seen on a ps camera with the only drawback being its fixed and i always liked my older G2 with that feature. so far im pretty happy with some of the test pics ive taken. i dont see a problem with noise as some complain about, but i try to be real. i am not likely to ever enlarge a photo to over 8x10 size, and most will never leave there digital albums or photo files. and those that do will likely be developed at walmart as 4x6`s so i tend to look at camera function and other basics verses weather theres some microscopic amount of noise at 100% enlargements. be real ., who prints 15 mp images at 100% ? unless your talking small crops. granted, probubly not a user who needs a 15mp camera. but it is fast, has alot of manual features. quick startup. as well as very good image quality in practical terms. some complain about its size, too large. compared to my old g2 the G10 is alot lighter weight and quite a bit more compact. the neck strap capability goes a long way in my favor also. smaller cameras tend to leave you with wrist straps that are a pain after a while, so you either put the camera in a pocket, which is slow to get to in a hurry, or deal with going around having only one arm or hand. the camera is almost too small for my hands, and that would be my only handling complaint. i like the zoom. wide angles rule. i had a 17-50 on my 20d and loved it. the g10 is close to that with its lens, a little longer and about the same on the wide end. i think the video feature is ok, im not a huge fan of video on still cameras, and as a occasional user of that feature i dont feel left out that it only has vga resolution there. face detection, amazing stuff, first camera ive had with that feature. well the lumix may have something like it but it doesnt work well. the G10s is awsome, i think the auto face/motion detection picture taking maybe a feature i will use.

my only real knocks are the software wont work on my 64 bit xp. so i can only use it on my laptop, though im fine with the card reader for most things, I have cs 2 for editing. would be nice if canon had updated software for 64 bit though.

[carbonadam @ Jan 3rd 2009 8:48PM]

Beautiful design. All that slick silver nonsense out there now is butt ugly.