Busy Weekend With Canon G1 X

[Photo-John]

Canon sent me their new G1 X high-end compact for review (Canon PowerShot G1 X intro article) and I had a very busy weekend with it. It was a crazy weekend with weather and activities for me. On Saturday I went mountain biking as a front rolled in and then Sunday we skied over a foot of fresh new snow in the mountains. I love spring in Utah

[Photo-John]

We also did something really cool for a friend's birthday on Saturday night. We snowshoed out to a really excellent dinner in a yurt at Solitude Ski Resort. The food was excellent and snowshoing out to the yurt was really cool. All the stuff I did over the weekenn also meant a really wide variety of photo conditions and subjects for the G1 X.

So far I have somewhat mixed feelings about the camera - it's very big for a "compact" camera and it's also very slow. But it totally shines in the one area where I really hoped it would - image quality. The big sensor Canon put in this camera really delivers. I found I was pretty comfortable shooting even as high as ISO 3200, and that's pretty unheard of for a compact camera. The night photo was taken handheld at ISO 3200 and 4/10ths second and the food prep photo was also shot at ISO 3200. I also pushed both photos pretty hard in Lightroom and Photoshop. This is very impressive low light image quality for a compact, non-interchangeable lens camera.

[Franglais]

How do you mean it's very slow?

I like the image quality. But I think it's too big for me. I need something genuinely pocketable.

[Photo-John]

How do you mean it's very slow?

I like the image quality. But I think it's too big for me. I need something genuinely pocketable.

Reaction time is slow. The burst mode is basically worthless and I had trouble missing photos. It could be there's a learning curve with the reaction time and settings. But the burst mode is a real disappointment - especially after the Fujfilm X10, which can do 5 FPS at full resolution RAW in any mode.