Canon PowerShot G10 Review Discussion

[David Rasnake]

My Canon PowerShot G10 review unit hadn't been out of the box ten minutes when the crowd of interested onlookers from the NotebookReview.com offices upstairs started filing by to poke, prod, and play with Canon's latest advanced compact. Of course, what everyone wants to know, and what more than one person who stopped by my office to examine the G10 discussed at length, was how the G10 compares to its venerable predecessor, the Canon G9.

Read the full content of this Article: Canon PowerShot G10 Review

[John B]

Interesting review David

[Andy Stanton]

Good review and the G10 seems like an excellent point and shoot. But for $500, it's competing directly with intro DSLR's like Canon's own XS or Sony's A200. I think Canon is going to have to lower its price to compete effectively.

[David Rasnake]

Thanks, guys. To Andy's point, I'm wondering a bit of the same thing: at the moment, it's not just Canon, but also Nikon and Panasonic as well that are slotting their advanced compact cameras right at that $500 price point. After the holiday buying season ramps up in coming weeks, we may see some movement on those prices, but I'll bet they'll all hold pretty close to the $500 until early 2009 anyway.

Some numbers that I've seen lately suggest that these kind of cameras generate a lot of interest in terms of research, review reads, etc., but command a disproportionately small share of the market compared to this high level of initial interest and consumer research. My own theory for the reasons behind this gap has to do with the price: lots of buyers are interested in the concept, but when it comes time to actually make a purchase, they're much more likely to spring for either A) a less expensive camera with manual controls, or B) an entry-level DSLR. At $350, a lot more potential buyers might become actual buyers, but at $500, I think the G10, LX3, and P6000 may all be "stuck in the middle" just a bit.

Food for thought,

dr

[jetstar]

Nice review David!

[Caleb Murdock]

Good review. However, I think this camera has very poor picture quality. All you need to do is to look at the picture of the cliff face at 100% to see how blurry and pixelated it is. There isn't any smoothness to the picture at all. I have a 7 MP Canon point-and-shoot camera with vastly better clarity. True, you can shrink the images from the G10 and end up with the same result, but what's the point? Why start with a poor picture which must be shrunk to increase the sharpness and to remove the artifacts?

I've also been disappointed with the image quality of the Panasonic G1 (although I haven't seen any converted-from-RAW images from that camera yet). Even so, I think that the M4/3 format is going to be the death knell of high-end compacts like the G10. There's a limit to what you can squeeze out of those tiny sensors, and 14.7 MP is obviously too much.

[Caleb Murdock]

Another comment!

Why aren't there any RAW images in the review? (And by that, I mean images converted from RAW.) On another site, there's a hot debate going on about this camera. Someone posted RAW images that look fabulous, in contrast to the JPG images I've been seeing (in this review and others) which are quite bad. If someone buys a camera that includes a RAW format, there's a good chance that person will want to use the RAW format, so I think you need to post some RAW samples. Thank you.

[David Rasnake]

Why aren't there any RAW images in the review?

Two reasons: first, the output from raw conversion is highly variable depending on which converter you use. Other sites that I've seen only use ACR with highly specified baseline settings, and while this may (being the most common converter) be an acceptable answer to the question of which converter and what settings would be used to generate the file, my experience has been that these tests tell you at least as much about the proclivities of the conversion utility as they do about the camera's capture.

Second, I think it's fair to ask how much raw capture on a camera like this actually gets used. You suggest that lots of potential G10 buyers will use this feature, but based on data that I've seen, I'd argue that while many will look for it in making a purchasing decision, only a small percentage of those will actually routinely use it. Hence, we test the compatibility of raw capture on review units to make sure everything is as advertised, but don't explore the differences between output methods in depth. With our core audience, it seems to me to be a better use of our time discussing the JPEG processing options a camera provides, since that's where most users (even on a camera like this) will end up anyway.

I fully expect that our readers will read reviews on other sites as well: with lots of resources out there, they should. And as your experience suggests, there are plenty of sites catering to a more advanced audience where you can find the nuances of raw conversion versus JPEG output explored ad nauseam. The folks that I've seen who do this kind of highly technical do a great job with it as a rule, and from an editorial perspective, this raises the question of whether one more voice is really needed on this issue.

In short, we may reevaluate our decision to not include the results of a raw conversion test at some point, but for now at least, the reviews are what they are.

dr

[Caleb Murdock]

Thank you for your response.

I guess you might say that I'm a "pixel peeper". I find the standard output of most cameras -- including most DSLRs -- to be too soft. Camera manufacturers seem to be intentionally adding blur to JPG images to mask image imperfections. It's a trend I really hate. Increasingly, it seems I'll have to take RAW photos if I want the clearest images.

Let me make a suggestion: In each review, post one RAW image, tweaked in whatever software you want to use (preferably the software that comes with the camera, but ACR is good too) just to show your readers what the camera is capable of. As a reader, if I can't see how good a camera's images can be, I just can't buy it, especially if the JPG images are blurry. And by the way, I'm not finding a lot of sites that examine RAW images ad nauseum.

Okay, I need to ask you about something else.

Your G10 sample photos are quite terrible. I though that they were showing excessive noise reduction, but on another forum, I'm being told that your choice of f/8 as the aperture is all wrong for this camera. People are talking about "Airy disks", "circles of confusion", pixel density, and other stuff. They say the photos have exceeded their diffraction limit. They are talking about you as being amateurs who don't know what you are doing. They say a camera like the G10 should not be set much smaller than about f/4 or f/5, and that f/8 is more suitable for large-sensor cameras. What about that?

[David Rasnake]

They are talking about you as being amateurs who don't know what you are doing. They say a camera like the G10 should not be set much smaller than about f/4 or f/5, and that f/8 is more suitable for large-sensor cameras. What about that?

What about it? The idea that I shouldn't even be allowed to operate a camera given my thoroughgoing lack of knowledge or skill, much less write about the experience, gets widespread traction on other forums. No arguments here on that one.

More to the point, yes, minimum aperture on this lens does (not surprisingly) show diffraction. It's also the auto-exposure system's preferred aperture setting in bright light. So if it performs poorly in your opinion at the settings it defaults to in auto/program mode, you should probably be aware of that.

(Incidentally, the 8x10s I printed from the G10's JPEG look fine to me, but being an incompetent amateur, I wouldn't trust my opinion if I were you. Moreover, I recognize that judging a camera's capabilities on actual printed output that normal people are likely to make is an antiquated evaluation method.)

dr