When the newest generation of the Canon G series, the G1X was announced, I got my hopes way up. A pocket sized camera with a full frame 14.3 megapixel sensor and all of the Canon G-Series usual controls plus more might just be the camera that we have been waiting for.
Here is how the G1X held up in my first two weeks with it.
Exterior handling:
The first thing I noticed when I held the G1X was that it felt like a real camera. The body is made of metal instead of the usual cheap plastic that most point and shoot cameras are now made with. This makes it heavier than most other cameras of its size, but in a good way. It is just heavy enough to feel substantial in the hand without being a pain to carry. It is well balanced and doesn’t feel like it is going to break if you breath on it wrong. Canon also equipped the G1X with a front facing control dial, which is a standard on most DSLRs, but rare in a point and shoot. This index finger dial helps to create a much more fluid and professional shooting experience by allowing you to change aperture and shutter setting more quickly than in the past G-series cameras when there was only a rear facing dial.
New to the G series, the G1X’s built in flash is a pop-up flash on the top left of the camera body instead of being directly in the frame right above the lens.
For the most part, the button and control setup on the G1X is quite good. There is no physical ISO dial on the top of the camera because of the new positioning of the flash. I thought this was going to be a major annoyance, but even though I had to use the digital menu to change the ISO, it is just a two click process, so it hasn’t really bothered me at all.
Canon was nice enough to add a little red-dot-button on the upper right hand side of the body that when pressed, immediately starts video capture. This allows the user to move from image to video capture and back again on the fly with ease.
The one major problem with the camera’s external design is the “view-finder”. I use the term loosely, because like all of its G-series predecessors, the G1X’s eye piece is nothing more than a crappy hole at the top of the body that has some crappy glass in it. Canon obviously intends for photographers to use the LCD screen on the back of the camera to compose their shots and check their aperture/shutter settings. However, since I am not a tourist and I am not using the G1X to take bar photos of my friends, I don’t think this system works.
I completely understand Canon’s decision to forgo a real and usable viewfinder on the G-series thus far. The shape and design of the cameras would make it very difficult (and likely very expensive) to try to fit a usable viewfinder into the camera. However, I think Canon needs to understand its customers a little bit better. Not many casual shooters are going to fork over the $800 to buy the G1X for everyday shooting. The main market for the G1X is going to be professionals and very serious amateurs. Two groups that would perfer (if not require) a solid working viewfinder and would be willing to pay the extra $50-$100 to have it. If we wanted to take photos composed on an LCD screen, we would use our iPhones. Since this is hands-down the biggest problem with the G1X, I would really love to see Canon spend a bit more time and effort trying to get a decent viewfinder into the next generation of the G-series.
Interior handling:
The start up time for the G1X is lightning fast. It takes between 2 and 3 seconds after pressing the power button for it to be ready to start snapping photos. That being said, once it is on, the G1X is a pretty slow moving camera. There is a significant delay between the time the shutter release is pressed, and when the shutter is actually released. The longest I’ve seen up to this point, is almost a full second delay. When trying to capture photographs of life on fast moving city streets, even a fraction of a second delay can make a huge difference.
This delay is made even worse by the fact that the autofocus is pretty slow too. I will note that the autofocus is very accurate and is faster than previous generations of the G-series, but it is still way too slow to capture fast moving subjects. And heaven forbid you have to change the zoom of the lens. That adds at least another 2 full seconds before you can get the shot off.
The digital menu of the G1X is just as easy to understand as the menus of its forbearers were. All of the display, shooting, and system options and controls are well marked, easy to find, and easy to understand. Only the most inexperienced novice would require an instruction manual to find their way around. Canon has done an excellent job setting up the user interface so that it never takes more than 3-4 clicks to change any of the important shooting settings, making it quick and easy to make setting changes on the fly. As a devote Nikon user in my professional life, I will admit to getting confused on how things like the display settings work from time to time. But I’m pretty sure that has more to do with me being accustomed to a different system than any lack of quality user interface design on Canon’s part.
The auto bracketing in the G1X is a noteworthy feature. For anyone that has a fancy for working with HDR, the auto bracketing options are easy to get to through the digital menu in 3 quick clicks and once the shutter release is pressed once, it auto fires however many exposures you set the bracketing too. If you are trying to capture for HDR without a tripod, this can be a lifesaver.
Canon also added the ability to set up 3 different custom shooting displays for the LCD screen that can be toggled between. I have found that when you have to use the LCD to compose the photograph, it is a BIG help to be able to split up the information display to save on screen real estate. I set up one display to only show my histogram, another that only has the auto balancer, and another that only displays the memory card data. That way I can get at all of that information quickly and easily, but I am never using more than about 15% of the screen on data displays.
The Final Images:
Excellent. Done.
Ok, in a little more detail. The fact that the 14.3 mpx full frame sensor is inside of a tiny point and shoot body makes absolutely no difference. The RAW images that come out of the G1X are on par with ones that come out of the Nikon D700 in terms of both quality and malleability (which, at an almost $2000 cost difference, is a pretty big deal).
The biggest difference I saw between the giant sensor of the G1X and the smaller cropped sensors of the G11 and G12 was the size of its dynamic range. While the 11 and 12 could both capture RAW images, unless it was a cloudy day, you were almost guaranteed to clip your highlights and shadows. My first day out with the G1X, I overexposed a number of captures by 2 stops to see how they would hold up in post production. With quick flick of the exposure slider in Camera Raw, all of the details of the images were there.
And as you can see, the color density and accuracy of the G1X is absolutely stunning for a point and shoot camera.
Canon continues to impress with their high ISO quality. I was able to take excellent quality pictures up to 1600 ISO, good to very good quality pictures up to 3,200 ISO, and then things got dicey after that. I’ve read other reviews that say that the G1X can take high quality images up to 6,400, but I don’t buy it. Any time I took it up that high, I got noticeable color shift and color noise. Still, usable photographs up to 3200 ISO from a pocket sized camera was previously unheard of.
A pretty significant disadvantage to the G1X is that the lens is not interchangeable. You are stuck (at least for now) with the one that Canon threw on there. It is a fairly ok lens for most situations. But it is very difficult to get a shallow depth of field. The lowest aperture that the lens can go down to is 2.8 (which, because of the distance between the lens and the sensor on such a small body, actually looks more like 4-5.6 to me). Meaning that the G1X is much better suited for landscapes than for macro work.
Now for the kicker. The CR2 RAW images that come out of the G1X are next to impossible to process at the moment. To be able to get the images from the camera and into photoshop, I had to download the beta (tester) version of PS6, Bridge 6, Camera Raw 7, and Adobe DNG converter 6.7. The Canon Software that comes with the camera can only export the CR2s as jpegs and tifs, completely killing the point of shooting in RAW and none of the other major softwares out there have worked in the G1X’s coding. Supposedly Lightroom 4 can read them, but I have heard mixed reviews on this matter. Some people say it works, others say it works for a couple of minutes but then crashes LR, and still others say that it doesn’t work at all. Since I am a Camera Raw/Bridge kinda guy, I was not willing to spend $100 on a program that I didn’t want, just so that I could convert the CR2s to DNGs for the next month or two until the final rollout of CS6. I’m sure that this will be a non issue within the next few weeks, but until then, it is extremely annoying.
Decision:
The G1X is one hell of a camera. The quality of the images that come out of it are of a prosumer, if not fully professional level. Its high resolution, beautiful color capture, and small size make it perfect for travel and landscape photography. The days of having to carry 40 lbs. of camera gear up the side of a mountain just to get a crystal clear shot from the top are over.
All that being said however, the G1X is not the digital street photographer’s dream that I had hoped for. Although it is fairly versatile, it does take high quality pictures, and it does fit into the palm of the hand, it is just too slow for street work. Between the shutter release delay, the slow lens zoom, and needing to compose with the LCD from lack of a reasonable viewfinder, there is just no way to move quickly enough to capture those slice of life images before they are gone.
Even though I won’t really be able to use it for the purpose that I had hoped, the G1X is still well worth the money I paid for it. If you usually have at least 15 seconds or more to compose your photographs and you don’t like carrying your DSLR everywhere you go, the G1X is the camera for you.
Maybe someday I’ll be able to digitally follow in the footsteps of the street photography greats:
Garry Winogrand
Robert Frank
Walker Evans
*Note: Someone out there is going to try to tell me that Evans was a portrait photographer and not a street photographer. Well you know what, he took those portraits on the streets. So don’t bother complaining about it.
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