A Canon Powershot G2 review
This page exists to share my experiences with using this lovely digital camera for about 15 months over the course of which nearly 9000 photographs have been made.
This successor to the 3MP Canon G1 was a such a big hit that Canon went overboard and threw in another X of zoom into the Canon G3 and, going further, yet another million pixels in the Canon G5 without needing to change more than a small fraction of the camera's basic qualities. There have been so many Canon Gxs sold that I hope that this information has some lasting value.
The Canon Powershot G2 is a 4 megapixel point-and-shoot digital camera with many more options and flexibility than your average point and shoot. These include the ability to shoot in RAW mode, a hotshoe attachment that will accept Canon's fancy flashes and the ability to be operated from a computer - to name a few.
First, the things that are annoying:
Auto-focus
It takes forever on moving objects - children for example - and locks up often loses the shot. AF in low light is bad. Finally, contrast fools the AF often. A picture of a face with a background of a tapestry or some clear pattern will often focus on the b/g instead of on the face.
The lens cap design is very ordinary. The black felt(?) lining inside the cap started to melt off in the heat. It still functions but it can be improved upon.
The manual focus is unusable. Part of this is because the image magnification in the LCD while in MF mode is extremely fuzzy and boily. Next, the placement of the MF button off to one side is plain bad.
An image with a a lot of deep dark purple-blue and not much else (for example, a flower close-up) completely fools the color meter, rendering it into a wierd purple.
The firmware has some glitches. When the camera is turned from an off position to the review mode, it sometimes wants to extend the lens for no reason. Since the cap is usually left on for browsing, this leads to that annoying beep-beep-beep sound. This is very intermittent though.
Now that those sore points are out of the way, what's to love?
The fast lens! This lovely lens is F2.0 at 34 mm and F2.5 at 102mm. This makes even somewhat low light photos also hand-hold-able.
The image quality. In clear, bright conditions, the Canon G2 can take some truly amazing pictures. Image quality is delicious. The best performance is at ISO 50 which can be really limiting in low light (think Velvia). ISO 100 is tolerable but anything higher - ISOs 200 or 400 - is unusable. At ISO 50, even 15 or 30-second exposures shows zero noise. Enlargements at 12X18 ($2.99 at Costco Photo, an irresistible deal) are beautiful even with ZERO Abobe Photoshop or other ressing-up work on the Large/Superfile Jpeg.
The bright and colorful swivel LCD. Shots that would otherwise require me to be either nearly 8 feet tall or to have my nose in the dirt are a piece of cake with the swivel LCD.
Sturdiness. I dropped this from about about a 4 foot height onto concrete pavement near the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and all it suffered were a few deep gashes and a small crack on the CF compartment door. Otherwise, the camera pretended that nothing happened and it was business as usual. I was unlucky that the strap and buckle slipped but lucky in that it did not fall right on the lens or on the LCD. I now staple the strap to itself an inch off the buckle and then tape over the staple. In terms of all-weather performance, this camera has worked just fine both several degrees below zero in freezing Chicago as well as in India. In Chicago's bitter cold, a horizontal line appeared on the LCD but this did not show on the final image.
Canon seems to have milked the G line of cameras about as far as it could. Rather than list some improvements I would have liked to see in this camera, I wrote up a series of predictions for the entire digital photography industry.
Other related links:
My thoughts on how to keep track of those 8000 plus photographs
Don Ellis' G1 and G2 Gallery
Anders Wahlstrom's G2 Gallery