Gadgetory

hi I'm Laurie grinnin senior editor for CNET and this is the canon powershot g1x what'd you think about the g1 X depends upon whether you view it as a cheap alternative to the fujifilm x100t to a lot of other fixed and interchangeable lens models because the price of the camera sets it apart from the crowd as much as its largest sensor and despite delivering on image quality and having a pretty nice shooting design the lens and to a lesser extent the shooting performance hold it back from being worth the price its bigger heavier and boxier than the G 12 and it uses a pop-up rather than a front-mounted flash but the g1 X nevertheless looks and feels quite similar to its older sibling overall I like the design though the function button behavior can get a little frustrating unlike other cameras which automatically hide the menu when you press the shutter button tannaz remains until you press the function button again as a result I free only found myself scrolling around the options when I thought I was changing the shutter speed I like the flip and twist LCD it's bright and big and then the optical viewfinder is quite small it is still useful to have the buttons and dials feel responsive and well laid out many of the new features like the multi area white balance and intelligent image stabilization launched with the s100 and they only work in auto mode the intelligent image stabilization auto detects what type of stabilization is necessary in both still and video modes and the updated white balance does better scene analysis the camera also introduces face recognition and can store up to 12 faces with some limited associated metadata you'll also find a bunch of multi shot modes including a 5 shot HDR mode though I find canons implementations just ok like the G 12 it has a built in neutral density filter which I like well the camera gets high marks for photo quality it's not significantly better than cheaper ilcs like the olympus EPL 3 or the Sony nex-5n one advantage that Canon does retain over its rivals is its excellent JPEG processing and noise reduction which allows it to produce dream we clean photos as high as ISO 400 and seriously usable ones up through ISO 3200 color and exposure looked great as well the lens has good Center sharpness but it's not that great on the edges movies look fine for casual shooting they've got decent sharpness and exposure with minimal rolling shutter but there's quite a bit of aliasing and there's a relatively narrow tonal range unfortunately the g1x gets relatively low marks for performance in part because of its sluggish shot-to-shot speed it's even slower than the G 12 and in part because of some really disappointing lens characteristics the camera doesn't feel a sluggish to shoot with as the data would imply but also I probably didn't notice because I spent a disproportionate amount of time dealing with the small aperture lens and it's bizarre focusing distance constraints I really would expect a wider than f/2 maximum aperture on an $800 camera but more important I expect it to be a lot faster than f5 8 at its longest telephoto not only does that compare poorly with similar focal ranges on the less expensive olympus XC 1 and Fujifilm x10 but it's worse in practice it's only f28 at 28 millimeters by about 30 1.5 millimeters it's already jumped to f3 2 and it narrows about halfway down the focal range and that's it and that's only one problem the other is the lenses minimum focusing distance it can only focus as close as 7.9 inches and that's in macro mode and standard focus it's more normal 1.3 feet also annoying the camera can only auto switch between macro and standard focus modes in complete auto that means unlearning habits about lens settings and spending too much time jumping in and out of macro modes a lot of people think that canons missing out by lagging in its interchangeable lens camera development and it is the g1x targets a growing part of the market which is composed of people who don't really care about changing lenses and just want better photo quality but ironically it's disappointing lens makes a better case for getting an ILC this price segment than for buying this fixed limbs option I'm Laurie Brennan and this is the canon powershot g1x