The Canon G12
In mid-September Canon announced the long awaited release of the Canon G12. I’ve written before about how well I like my old Canon Powershot G9. I bought it right after they were released (3-4 years ago?) and it’s been a trooper. With as many (maybe more but I’m not going to count) features as my full on Digital 35mm Canon bodies but with the size, portability and access of a compact digital camera it easily does all the basic photography chores I need it to.
I haven’t upgraded from my G9 thus far because it’s been reliable, still works like the day I bought it and it has a couple features that I didn’t want to give up and the upgrades on the G10 and G11 just didn’t seem substantial enough to let it go. With the arrival of the Canon G12 and a new feature set I’m thinking it may be time to finally hang up the G9 and move on to the G12.
First, a bit about how I use my G9. 95% of the images I use on this blog are from my G9. It’s a great fishing camera for a lot of reasons, mostly that its compact, has a good lens, shoots in a variety conditions (not underwater unfortunately) and it really takes good quality, even publishable images. And the macro is pretty incredible for a little camera. That was actually one of the selling points for me and I wasn’t disappointed. Shooting little aquatic bugs and tied flies in a vise is a cinch and they look great. Considering the way I tie, usually to good.
Of course it gets used for family images, the typical vacation kind of stuff at which it excels also. The video is of nominal use mostly because it really isn’t that great of quality so I’ve never used it much. It’s built like a brick, I don’t abuse it but it can, and has taken some knocking around. All around, it’s a pretty hard camera to beat.
So, what’s got me looking at the new Canon G12? Here’s the main features, considering they way I use my G9.
- New video capabilities- High Definition (HD), 720p at 24 fps (frames per second) with stereo audio. I was hoping for 1080 at a higher frame rate but hey, I’m not taking up big screen cinematography (yet) but for the web use and home viewing it will do just fine.
- Better viewing screen- The G11 introduced the “fly out” screen and it didn’t exactly bowl me over because I thought it would be something that I would eventually break off the camera. But trying to get low angle shots of bugs or a fish in the water is damn near impossible with a fixed screen so I’m warming up to this. It’s not new but the quality of the viewing screen is getting an upgrade that makes it viewable from angles; kind of like the advent of big screen TV’s that you can now watch from the side without looking at a picture that looks like someone badly tweaked the gamma and color controls. Age isn’t doing my visual acuity any favors either so I need all the help I can get.
- Improved image quality- Canon has bucked the trend for more mega pixels; the G9 has 12MP, the G10 has 14.7, but they scaled back to 10MP with the G11 and started working on noise reduction that typically comes with high ISO and low light shooting. The Canon G12 is the first G-series camera to use the HS system with a high-sensitivity 10.0 Megapixel CCD sensor and high-performance DIGIC 4 processor. The idea being that fewer high quality pixels with less noise is better than a lot of crappy ones. This is a welcome feature because my G9 really is only acceptable to ISO 200, 400 in a pinch if its just going on a web page or small print, after that forget it for anything serious.
- HDR (High Dynamic Range)- This sounds great but how powerful it will actually be will require some actual use. Previously HDR has only been available as software for post image processing, it’s in Photoshop and is available as standalone software and it doesn’t always look natural.
Basically the idea is that most images have a contrast range, the range between shadows and highlights that are not recordable by digital CCD’s or film alone (the range that the human eye can see) so the engineers had to come up with something that makes this possible. HDR is the current fix. It’s not perfect but it is better. It works by taking a series of images that records detail in the shadows all the way up to images that show detail in the highlights and combines them to bring the full contrast range back into the image, close to how the human eye sees it. The Canon G12 does this by taking 3 images and combines them together. My guess is that it will probably be better but not perfect. The reason I have my doubts is that many software programs require several more images and a lot more image processing power than this to really get high contrast image details but it’s a start.
- IS (image stabilization) enhancements- in macro mode! Of course this is cool and it should be a little more forgiving in low light and macro shooting situations BUT; it’s probably still no substitution for some kind of mount, a bean bag or mini pod. I’ve got a Gorilla Pod and they really are handy.
That’s my personal features short list for the Canon G12. Again, my primary use is a compact digital camera that delivers high end images. Something I can grab quickly and capture some images without hauling out a camera bag of full sized DSLR equipment but still have DSLR controls if I need them. Plus having HD video is just a little extra frosting on the cake!
Canon list for the G12 is $500 US.
TheCanonG12.com – Detailed look at Canon G12 features.
Buy the Canon G12 at Amazon:
Canon G12 10MP Digital Camera with 5x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.8 inch Vari-Angle LCD
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