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Canon G11 pro-pocketable
Friday, 14 May 2010
I’ve had pictures published in glossy magazines I shot with an old PowerShot G6, and as long as you don’t expect double-A4 spreads, it has been a very competent camera, and indispensable. (Nowadays I use a 5D MkII for glossy mags.)
Skip a few generations, though, and Canon’s latest 'G' camera is the 10-megapixel G11, (it’s still a ‘PowerShot’, but this word is now just discretely scripted on the left of the camera top).
Apart from the extra megapixels, it has an optical image stabiliser and ‘Intelligent Auto’. The G11’s CCD is designed to shoot well in low light while reducing both image noise and blur. You access these new features by turning the top selector to Low Light Mode (it’s the first position below Auto). Sensitivity (the equivalent film speed) covers ISO 80/100/200/400/800/1600/3200. It’s easy to dial sensitivity in yourself – choose Auto or one of the other settings – as the dial skirts the top-mounted mode dial and has a knurled outside edge very easy to find with a finger.
Lens and LCD
The lens is a built-in Canon 5x optical zoom, starting at 28mm (equivalent) for wide-angle shots, zooming-in to the equivalent of a 140mm telephoto.
The camera handles focussing distances of 50cm to infinity, but in macro it can get as close as one centimetre from the lens (out to 50cm) at wide angle – and it’s true, it does! (Below).
The lens of the G11 set to Macro – this fly was just over one centimetre from the lens
Like the G6 (and as you’d expect from a pocketable Canon that pros like to carry) it shoots RAW format if you want it to, and JPEG.
A great thing is the vari-angle rear-mounted LCD screen. At 2.8-inches diagonally, it shows around 461,000 pixels. Fine – but ‘Vari-angle’ means you can swing it out to any angle and it swivels too: you can actually swing it out and then completely over for self portraits (above), but I find the LCD most useful as both an extra steadying grip (holding the outside frame edge) and for holding either above my head or down at waist level with the LCD still fully visible. This is a fantastic feature for concerts, for example, and in many other instances.
It’s light and comfortable, compared to the old G6; it’s a lot more like the G10 in form. Five years is a long time at Canon: by comparison, the G11 really does make the G6 look clunky and old fashioned.
Feature set
As you’d also expect from a pro-pocketable, it has many other features too. The focus system is TTL Autofocus (Single/Continuous), Servo AF (with Servo Auto Exposure) and, of course, manual.
The focusing frame has face detection, and it will detect several faces in a group shot and try and set the best exposure and focus to suit. Bizarrely, the camera can even detect (or try to detect) when people have their eyes shut – just turn on ‘Blink detection’!
It also has ‘Center3’ and ‘Flexizone’ – which lets you move the focus point yourself. It has Auto Focus, Auto Exposure, White Balance, Flash Exposure, Auto Red-Eye correction, Auto Focus Point Zoom and Face Self Timer.
In Continuous Shooting at the largest image size, the G11 can capture approximately 1.3 shots per second; auto-focusing in continuous mode (ie, with the camera tracking and refocusing on a moving subject) this drops to 0.7 shots per second.
But: remote shooting is unavailable (the old G6 had a remote that came with it) out of the box.
Light metering comes in three forms – evaluative, centre-weighted average and spot.
A cool feature is an Exposure Compensation dial right on top left of the camera, with plus or minus two stops in 1/3rd-stop increments.
I think the Quick Shot mode is a bit odd – in theory, it’s for grabbing the camera and shooting with the LCD swung shut so you don’t miss a shot, but you’d have to remember to select this mode in your scramble. Would you? Especially when the camera works in any mode with the LCD shut anyway. Anyway, it will still detect faces etc in this mode; you just can't see the selections.
White Balance Modes include Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, Flash, Underwater, Custom 1 and Custom 2 (which you can set up yourself).
Under Special Scene you get the options Portrait, Landscape, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets, Indoor, Sports, Sunset, Night Scene, Fireworks, Beach, Underwater, Aquarium, Foliage, Snow, Colour Accent, Colour Swap, Stitch Assist and also there are options for Vivid, Neutral, Sepia, Black & White, Positive Film, Lighter Skin Tone, Darker Skin Tone, Vivid Blue, Vivid Green, Vivid Red and Custom Colour. To swing through these options, spin the jog dial.
Some of these settings just apply a saturation designed for the predominance of a colour in a certain type of scene – Foliage, for example, boosts greens, browns and reds.
In the shots below, this is autumn foliage shots on Auto (left) and on the Foliage setting (right). So depending on your point of view, you could say it's a bit artificial.
A lot of this information is displayed on the LCD – you might have a job remembering what all the little icons mean, but I guess if you use it a lot – and it is designed to be a workhorse – this won’t be a problem.
Like my older workhorse, the G11 also shoots video, but a much more impressive H.264 .mov file with mono sound as per the previous model, the G10. This can be set to PAL or NTSC.
The full specs are on Canon’s site.
Layout
On the right-side top is an indented on/off switch, and ahead of that is the raised shutter release with a little toggle lever ahead of that for zoom in and out.
A dial to the left of this – still on the right-top of the G11 but near the centre – offers P (Program), Tv (Shutter Priority), Av (Aperture Priority), M (Manual), C1, C2, Lowlight, Quick Shot, Movie and Special Scene, which in turn taps a whole lot more particular shooting modes (as above).
Below this is the collar which lets you twirl and click-stop to set light sensitivity, from Auto through 80 to 3200 in seven increments. If you know your cameras, 80 is for bright light and 3200 for very low light, aka the ‘faster’ and therefore grainier film of the analogue days.
Slightly ahead of this dial, on the side of the viewfinder housing there are two little little slots – under this is the mono microphone for sound recording when you are making movies.
Then there’s a hot-shoe for a proper external flash, as per ‘real’ cameras, set slightly to the left of centre over the optical viewfinder, and on the left of this (extreme left) is the exposure compensation dial.
On the back starting at left-top, is the ‘S’ button, which is for direct-printing with the camera plugged directly into a PictBridge-compatible printer. If it’s not plugged into a printer, it’s the Shortcut button you can register settings to.
To the right of that is the diopter adjusted to compensate the optical viewfinder to suit different eyes, the viewfinder itself and the Play switch (I do so like this being a completely separate switch).
The Asterisk button at top right on the camera-back is the exposure lock – expose, press this and the exposure is locked. Move the camera and it will hold the exposure when you shoot, then reset afterwards.
Below that is the trash and Auto Focus frame-selector button – frame selector in shoot mode, trash a single image in Playback mode. In Face Detection, you can press this button and use the jog dial to switch between detected faces for exposure and focus.
To the right of this is the metering mode (three choices – evaluative, centre-weighted and spot).
In the middle of the back-right of the camera is the jog-dial which, in top, bottom left and right positions, clicks to choose Macro, manual focus, the flash settings (with different options available for Auto and the other modes) and the self-timer button. Inset is the central Function Set (Func Set) button. Twirl the dial to select up and down through menu choices presented, when you press the Menu button (below and to the right), on the LCD. This Menu button is at extreme lower right on the back, beneath the jog-dial, and next to that is the Disp (display) button.
On the right side is a pop-door with the USB2 mini connector (as with all Canons, the USB cable you need is supplied), the AV digital out port (for viewing on compatible monitors and TVs).
Underneath there’s a tripod mount, plus the slide-outwards-to-make-it-spring-open door, under which sits a smaller, squarer rechargeable battery than what I’m used to, plus the SD card slot. (The SD card was not supplied for this camera, but the battery is, complete with the recharge cradle complete with NZ-style power cable.)
On the front you have just the rubber-feel right-hand finger grip, the ‘G11’ moniker, the low-light focus-aid beam, the optical viewfinder, the little built-in flash, and the lens, which is covered by a sliding four-blade plastic lens cover when the camera is turned off and the lens retracts.
In use
When the camera is on, apart from the lens extending out about two centimetres, a green LED set into the power button glows. An orange light appears next to the top-mounted Mode Selector dial as the locator mark, but the lamp only lights when the ISO dial is set to Auto, and yet another lamp appears as a locator mark over on top left, for the exposure compensation dial. This only glows if the conditions and camera settings will let you compensate exposure, using the dial next to it – and that’s a good indicator to remember.
Finally, there are two LEDs next to the viewfinder. If the top viewfinder indicator is green, the camera is ready to shoot; if it’s blinking it’s recording an image. If it’s orange, the flash is charged and ready to fire.
If the bottom indicator blinks yellow, the G11 can’t focus. If it’s steady yellow, it indicates manual focus is on. It pays to learn these indicators.
In Play mode, you can click the left or right edge if the jog-dial to advance backwards or forwards through the pictures you have taken, or you can rotate the jog dial to go through faster, handy for finding one picture among many.
Using the zoom control in Play mode lets you inspect recorded images more closely; then you can move up and down, and left to right zoomed in, using the jog dial.
Results
Absorbing all that, what are the pictures like? Pretty good. A direct but thoroughly unfair comparison between a shot of the same car in the same 10-minute time frame done on both the G11 and a Canon 5D MkII, which shoots full 35mm sensor 24 megapixel images, is interesting. Left, above is the G11, right above is the 5D MkII.
Below, on the G11, zoomed in 400% in Photoshop.
The 5D (below) is definitely sharper, and colour rendition is truer even when I compared JPEGs.
The G11 warmed the image slightly on the Auto setting, but it was surprising how much shadow detail the G11 still picked up once boosted through the curves control of Photoshop.
Below, on the 5D MkII, zoomed in 400% in Photoshop.
The 5D image had more shadow detail still, but they were not dissimilar in picking up detail in the shadows you will assume is not even registered.
Check out these detail shots both at 200%. Also, check out the third shot down – the very high-definition RAW version of the very same shot on the 5D. It’s amazing …
Anyway, that’s a different camera, and vastly more expensive.
Accessorising
As you’d expect for a camera aimed at serious users, accessories are available from Canon so you can extend its utility, including the Canon range of SpeedLite flashes. But you can also get macro ring-light flashes that encircle the lens.
While the lens itself is not swappable, you can buy teleconverters that fit onto it, a soft and a waterproof case, a flash remote, a remote control unit, a flash bracket and flash extension cables.
A direct comparison with the predecessor G10 is inevitable – you get the same DiG!C 4 processor, but you got 14.7megapixels with the G10, a considerable resolution boost, so one has to wonder why Canon cut back on the resolution in a newer model. Apparently, it was to address low-light failings of the G10, which attracted criticism for noisy results shot at over 400 ISO.
The G10 – which was a $100 cheaper on release, by the way – also had a bigger LCD but it was fixed and not vari-angle, but they both show 461,000 pixels. The G11 also has many more shooting modes, so it’s more flexible, and the G11 also brought RAW format back. The omission of the vari-angle LCD and RAW format were the biggest criticisms of the G10. But the G10 could also shoot higher resolution movies and the battery lasted a bit longer.
The lens is the same (5x optical zoom), but the G11 boasts considerable improvements in low-light capabilities.
Once again, I didn't use any of the Canon utilities for Mac that are on the CD. I installed nothing. On the Mac, iPhoto saw and handled the images immediately and I changed it to Image Capture anyway, as is my preference. Plus in the USB cable, press Play on the back of the camera (even if it's off) and in truck your snaps.
Verdict
Overall, I’d have to say that for what’s essentially a point-and-shoot, the G11 takes very good photographs with enough features, modes and settings to keep the most gadget-obsessed happy for hours. Days, even.
The fact you can load favoured settings into the Shortcut button, plus custom settings into the C1 and C2 settings on the mode dial, means you can take your preferred kind of pictures almost instantly – and hey, the auto setting is pretty damn competent, too.
The swing-out rotating LCD is a boon, but the G11 is still pocketable and makes the ideal single-camera you can accessorise, or an extra camera for those who like to buy and use good cameras. Overall, exposures seem very well balanced and flash pictures show a huge improvement over the rather much older G6 I still use.
What’s great: Pocketable, sophisticated but usable camera with good enough resolution for many tasks
What’s not: The zoom lever is a bit clunky – it’s small and not that positive to use. It zooms in swoops, so it’s hard to get exactly the right zoom level. Manual focusing using this and a slider-indicator in the LCD is really not great to use.
Needs: people who read manuals.
What: Canon PowerShot G11 pocketable prosumer digital camera, RRP $999.95
System: Mac: OS X v10.4-v10.5 (but it seems totally fine on 10.6x Snow Leopard), or Windows XP SP2/SP3/Vista including SP1/SP2. Interface is USB2, and you can pop in an SD, SDHC, MultiMediaCard, MMCplus card or an HC MMCplus memory card. These fit into a single slot revealed when you open the battery compartment.
Available from: Specialist photographic shops, some electronics retailers and Mac resellers – further information from Canon NZ Ltd.
