Links: Official Canon G10 Page / DPReview Article / Flickr G10 Images / Show Official Info /

The Canon G10 continues the evolution of their prosumer "rangefinder" format camera, a category I'm very fond of because it leverages the strengths of digital cameras (small size and live view), without carrying the baggage of SLRs (over weight, kludged live view - or none at all). The G9 was nice, though not perfect, and the G10 is nicer, especially with its new 28mm (equiv) zoom lens and some nice exterior tweaks, most notably the exposure dial on top of the camera, but it's still far from perfect.

If you're looking for an alternative to taking a DSLR everywhere but still want high quality pictures, the G10 may be the camera for you. I've been shooting with it exclusively for the last two months, and am impressed with it's image quality, form factor, and wide angle view…but it's speed, both in shooting and in light gathering capabilities gives me less than I'd hoped for. The uprezzing the camera enjoys from its previous version (from 12.7 to 14.9 Megapixels) is both unsurprising and unimpressive. Unsurprising because consumers care more about Megapixels than any other measure of a camera, and unimpressive because what the camera really needs is a more sensitive sensor. Though I'm a fan of wider lenses, the camera would have benefited more from a faster lens than a wider one, though I'd be happy to take both.

One of the features shared by both the G10 and its predecessor is the ability to shoot Raw camera files, and to save them along with a high quality JPG. Raw files are to digital photography what negatives were to film, a record of all the data the camera "saw" when the shutter was clicked. For serious photographers, Raw is an important part of their workflow…but there's a price to pay in file size, and each file is about 20 MB in size. You can't just copy RAW files off the camera by exploring its SD card either, for that you'll need Canon's point and shoot ZoomBrowser EX, rather than the tools they use for their EOS cameras. So far as I could tell, there's no way to get the camera to erase after transfer, which may seem like an appropriate safety feature, but to me winds up being more of a nuisance. Given that I'm shooting in RAW mode most of the time, moving those 19MB files across to the computer takes long enough for me to set it up and walk away rather than hang around for instant gratification.

Digital Photography Review (see links above) decided that the "shutter lag with LCD live view activated is not too bad, but we are still far from DSLR territory, and this is certainly not a camera to use if you want to capture the decisive moment, or shoot action." I agree with the latter part, but see no reason to let the G10 off the hook for the former. Compared to a DSLR, it's annoyingly slow, especially in poor light as I found while trying to catch a picture of a fairly slow moving toy train coming around the track. Composing the picture with the shutter halfway down only went so far to address this lag, and I found myself leading the train by a fair amount to get it where I wanted. This just isn't good enough performance for a camera that looks to mimic the serious rangefinder category of performance in a digital, and there are plenty of other small digital cameras I can point to that don't suffer from it.

There's no question but that Canon knows how to make superb cameras, as shown by both the DLSR and Digital ELPH lines. Unfortunately, while they've gotten a lot right on the G10 in terms of form factor and picture quality, they missed the boat on responsiveness and lens speed. The G10 is fully capable of creating professional quality images, as well as snapshots of your family. Unfortunately, the effort needed to get it to do either undermines quality of its images.