Gadget Maven Blog

The best camera is always the one you have with you. If you’re at a party or walking the streets of Marrakesh, you want something you can put in a pocket and not have to worry about. Sure, you could do amazing things with a big Nikon D90, but it would spend a lot of time at home without you.
That’s where ‘prosumer’ digicams come in: simple to use as a point-and-shoot, but with the features and manual control to develop your abilities – all in a compact, pocketable frame.
Canon’s G series cameras have always been big for compacts (you’ll get the G10 into a jacket or cargo pocket), but they’ve long had the biggest reputation, too. And the G10, released at the end of 2008, is a giant leap forward.
At last, Canon has put a wide-angle lens on its G series. Point-and-shoot consumers go for the big zoom numbers (50-240mm), then wonder why they can’t get the whole family in the frame at Christmas dinner and their holiday pics always show half a building. The G10’s 5x zoom starts at a wide 28mm and zooms to 140mm, which is an ideal range for landscapes, single and group portraits, and pretty much everything urban. If you’re shooting sports or wildlife, you may – may – find Canon’s teleconverter useful.
There’s a 14.7MP CCD, longer-lasting battery, upgraded software, and a bigger and better LCD. You’ll get superb images, with fast startup and autofocus. Classic rangefinder form, rugged build quality, and good ergonomics for one-handed operation. It looks a little intimidating for beginners, but they’ll cope. It looks the part, and it’s a pleasure to use. We haven’t spoken to a G10 owner who doesn’t enjoy playing with it.
The competition is Nikon’s P6000: smaller, with a 2.5x 24-60mm zoom. In our opinion it’s a close second. Investigate online and you can enjoy one of photography’s most sacred traditions, the Canon vs Nikon jihad. It’s like Blue Bulls and Sharks supporters, but with smaller fingers. We don’t think the Nikon guys will win this round, though.
(Want to join in? Just slag one of them off online. Compare, say, a Canon DSLR with a Nikon compact and conclude that Nikon lenses are inferior. It drives them nuts.)

• Price: R7 500

Features

• 14.7 Megapixels
• 5x wide-angle lens (28-140mm, f/2.8-45) with optical image stabiliser and 1cm macro
• Buffered RAW recording, DIGIC 4 processing, live histogram
• Face recognition, Face Select & Track
• Bright 3.0” LCD (460k resolution), optical viewfinder
• 26 shooting modes, full manual mode, customisable controls
• Video’s not HD, but it’ll shoot 640 x 480 pixels at 30fps
• 109 x 78 x 46 mm, 350g

More info

• See the full specs on the Canon website.
• Read the DPreview here and Luminous Landscape here

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 9:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.