The Current Leader of the Pack
Written: Jan 02 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Large battery, hot shoe, raw files
Cons: Software not first rate, optical viewfinder not great
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| dboreham's Full Review: Canon PowerShot G1 Digital Camera |
As of early 2001, the G1 is the best sub-$1000 (actually the best sub-$2000 also) digital camera on the market.
Why ? Some reasons:
1. Battery---digital cameras of today are power hungry. However many
cameras either have a small battery (presumably to save weight and cost),
or are not supplied with rechargeable batteries (you need to use rechargeables). The G1 comes with a good sized LiIon battery which is also
used by some Canon camcorders, so it is fairly inexpensive and you
can get 3rd party replacements from the likes of www.batterybarn.com.
2. IBM microdrive support. If you need to shoot more than a few tens of
pictures in one session (I took 109 on christmas day), a microdrive is
the practical storage option. Nikon cameras do not support the microdrive.
3. RAW file format. While the low compression JPEG files the camera
produces are fine for snapshots, for serious work where you will edit
the image on computer, some kind of raw image format is a must.
Canon use a proprietary lossless compression scheme to achieve a sub-3Mb
raw file size---not much larger than the superfine jpeg files.
Other vendors produce TIFF files which are much, much larger (and hence
use valuable CF storage space and take longer to download).
4. Hot shoe for flash. The G1 supports Canon's excellent EX flashes,
with all the features. Significantly better than the competition.
I have the 420EX---simply amazing compared to on-camera flashes, and
with digital you get to see the picture you took with flash---not
possible with film so flash flexibility is even more important here.
5. The Lens has a maximum aperture of f2.0 --- the largest of
any camera in this class. There are other cameras using the same
lens (Sony and Epson, I believe), but those have other shortcomings.
The larger aperture is useful for low light shots and to reduce the
depth of field for portraits.
6. 50 ISO speed. I don't know of another digital camera in this class
which has a 50 speed. Great for low noise pictures, and also to allow
wider apertures to be used in bright conditions.
Cons, not many: the optical viewfinder is rather lame, but I find myself
composing with the LCD and eyeballing the scene directly rather than
using the viewfinder. The software is a little clunky (it takes rather
too long to convert RAW to TIFF, for example). Hopefully the software will
improve in time since it is also used for the high-end Canon D30.
Due to the shutter/iris design, the camera stops down to f8 if
a shutter speed higher than 1/320 is used. I thought this might be
inconvenient for brightly lit portrait shots, but haven't yet seen
this happen in the field.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dboreham
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Member: David Boreham
Reviews written: 9
Trusted by: 8 members
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