(If you hear Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson reading this to you in your head, don’t be surprised.)
Nearly one year ago, I, a dedicated film photographer, did something unthinkable: I bought a digital camera. No, I hadn’t eaten one too many happy pills. No, I hadn’t drank my fixer one too many times. (Mmm, fixer!) No, rather, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to stop burning film on snapshots and marginal images, and a digital camera would help me fix that.
For the last decade, the Canon G series have been amongst the best performing digital cameras in the world. These little machines have been the backbone of advanced amateur photographers, especially photographers shooting candid images — you know, street photographers, wannabe pornographers, and stalkers. Over the years, though, the G series has wandered. As Canon introduced more and cheaper and better digital SLR cameras, the company began intentionally crippling the G series, to reduce in-house competition. Things came to a head when, with the introduction of the G7, RAW file format capabilities went the way of the 110 instamatic.
So it is with some trepidation that the news of the G7’s replacement was greeted in 2007. What would be gone next? No manual controls? No viewfinder? No hotshoe?
But no. The bitch, as Sir Elton would say, is back. Meet the Canon Powershot G9.
The Canon Powershot G9, courtesy khedra @ flickr
Like all its G series forebearers, the G9 is a handsome machine. It has the classic lines of a mid-20th century rangefinder. The body is sleek and matte black. And unlike many of the competing cameras in the G9’s market segment, it isn’t made of the same material as Jacko’s nose; the G9 is metal bodied with only a small plastic piece closing in the top of the camera. The result is a body that feels solid and rugged. It also makes the camera heavy; unlike, say, a Fuji Finepix S100, if you swung this thing on it’s neck strap you could probably kill someone with it. This handy trait should make the G9 quite popular in, say, Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles.
But forget how it looks. What really matters is how the G9 performs as a camera. The first thing you notice when you pick it up is… dials! The G9, like every proper camera ever made, has little round turnable dials! In this case, one controls ISO, while the other scrolls through shooting mode. While the camera does have special “idiot modes”, they are mercifully buried under a single dial entry labelled “SCN”. The rest of the dial cycles through video, a panorama mode, an all automatic mode, program, shutter priority, aperture priority, manual, and two customizable settings.
The back of the camera sports some buttons, along with a rotating selector, and a truly massive 3″ LCD screen. Although bright sunlight can still play havoc with the latter, the LCD is unusually bright and has a wide acceptable viewing angle. Unfortunately the screen is hard attached to the back — no fold out tilting screen like older G series cameras, meaning that its a bit harder to do those sneaky, creepy candid shots. Those buttons allow the user to customize the camera settings, including –mercifully! — the ability to turn off those dumb “look at me I’m taking a picture!” system sounds and that absolutely pointless fake shutter mirror sound.
Once you’ve shed the poser features of the camera, you discover all sorts of other customizable options, like how long the LCD will stay on after no activity is detected, or if you want digital zoom, or enabling advanced features like image stabilization and red eye reduction. And of course, you can also set it to remember whatever settings you are in now via one of those customizable dial entries up top. Be warned that it will not only remember your white balance, color mode, control method, and so on, but also your exact aperture and shutter settings. Be sure to set it when you’re in typical conditions for the mode you’re saving, or you might find yourself constantly resetting the shutter speed from 1/8th like I was. I didn’t bother playing with the idiot modes; they are, after all, for idiots.
Image quality is outstanding. The camera has a whopping 12.1 megapixels. To put that in perspective, when the Nikon D1 came out just about nine years ago and revolutionized newsrooms with digital photography, it had 4.3 megapixels. The G9 has nearly three times that. That’s more megapixels than the original digital Rebel, more megapixels than Nikon D80, more megapixels than the Moon. Images shot at ISO 400 came out crisp with only a marginal grain that is comparable to most 400 speed films, and ISO tops out at a stunning (albeit somewhat grainy) 3200!
Basic adjustments like white balance, color modes, and the like is easily accessed via a button on the back, and can be made rapidly on the fly. Intriguingly the camera includes a built-in neutral density filter, three different metering modes, and the ability to fine tune flash output. You can even select auto bracketing, and switching between resolutions, image sizes, and file formats can all be handled in seconds. It’s absolutely brilliant.
Of course, not all is perfect with the G9. The manual focusing is accomplished by hitting a button on the camera back and then using a rotating selector to fine tune the focus, which can be monitored on the LCD display. This is fine except that the LCD version of a focus screen is still relatively small and hard to judge by.
In addition, the G9 feels too small. In the typical “how small can we go” digital camera theory, the G9 is a lot smaller in person than in photos. The big screen on the back will within seconds of opening the box begin to collect thumbprints from your left hand. You get the impression that if Canon had stopped trying to make the camera smaller, there would have been room for a slightly more intuitive manual focusing system.
…Or perhaps to fix the viewfinder. Now on a camera in this price point, you’d expect the viewfinder to be sharp and poised. And… you’d be wrong. The image seen though it is on 80% of the visible scene, and what’s worse, it’s not centered, horizontally or vertically. It’s utter rubbish. You could always get used to cropping your images, but what’s the point of 12.1 megapixels if you can’t use them all? The least they could have done is properly centered the 80% you can see. Ironically, it is equipped with a manually adjustable diopter to accommodate for the user’s eyesight. To see what? 80% of a scene with no idea what portion that 80% is of? Totally useless!
Still, the overall feel of holding the G9 in your hand is hard to beat. It feels like a quality product, and despite a totally useless viewfinder and a body size about 20% too small, it quickly becomes very intuitive to shoot with. Putting it through its paces on city streets, the G9 becomes a fast blast for quick images. And its size is also a plus point, as it can easily be tucked into a pocket or under a coat and not attract any attention at all.
There is one more downside, however. After a hard day of shooting, the next morning the G9 will not have your breakfast fixed. This is actually one of the camera’s redeeming features. Most camera makers offer machines these days that not only take photographs, but do your washing, balance your checkbook, call your mother, take the dog for a walk, and iron your shirts. And all this before tea time. But does the G9 have any of these extra features? No. The G9 is a photographer’s camera. Sure, it has some useless idiot modes, but with the turn of a sleek and very familiar feeling metal dial, the camera becomes a precision image making machine.
The Powershot G9 is simply brilliant. I can’t say enough good things about it. Weighing in at nearly $500, it’s not a cheap camera. But for the price of a crippled entry level dSLR made of recycled styrofoam coffee cups and cheese, you can have one of the best made, best performing digital point-and-shoot cameras ever. Canon just announced an improved version called the G10 with added megapixels, but really, a good closeout or used G9 is a much better bargain. It’s a more than worthy successor to the 35mm rangefinders of the last century.
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