Gadgetory

Condon made some major changes to the Powershot g1x before throwing the mark to monitor on him the improvements include great new 5x zoom lens with a much better f-22 3.9 maximum aperture and a selfie friendly tilting touchscreen but the not so improvements include a drop in effective resolution for its 1.5 inch sensor and exchanging the built-in optical viewfinder for a rather pricey electronic one I'm Laurie Brennan and this is the canon powershot g1 x mark - the design of the mark ii sports a more typical look than its predecessor and overall i like it for casual shooting the touchscreen is responsive big and bright and pretty easy to use in sunlight the highlight though is the lens as much for its design as for specs it has two rings one clicky one to which you can assign a lot of different functions including step zoom and one smoothly turning one to which you can assign a couple of functions both have context-sensitive uses it includes a built-in lens cover as well which I really like it also has a higher popping up tilting flash unfortunately I really don't like the slender grip which doesn't feel sufficient given the camera's weight it weighs as much as a DSLR body but the grip is a fraction of the size Canon offers a bigger optional grip but given the high price and size of the camera well making it extra cost feels a bit chintzy same goes for the optional viewfinder which will run you about $300 and doesn't even seem to be available everywhere yet the performance is a bit problematic as well the autofocus system is slow possibly because the lens doesn't move all that fast I occasionally missed shots because it simply took too long to fix on the subject and in dim light I got the can't focus icon more often than I liked and I couldn't always figure out why the continuous shooting is reasonable though 3.1 frames per second with autofocus the image quality is very good though not great as you'd expect for such an expensive camera still depending upon the scene content you can probably use the full size images up to about ISO 200 videos unimpressive with lots of edge artifacts and you have no manual controls it's fine for sharing small clips with friends though the canon powershot g1 x mark 2 is a fine camera with a very nice lens and some great design points but the performance lags and the image quality doesn't quite earn excellent marks I'm Lori Brennan and this is the canon powershot g 1x market