Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have been using Canons for decades, film and digital. I have owned a G9 for years, and got this as a replacement. I wanted to love the camera, and originally did, but with use, the clutzy handling (due to poor design/target-market choices by Canon) and the limitations of the lens have me relegating the camera to third stringer. My angle is this: I used to be a working pro. I started out in large format and became a photojournalist. In a camera like this, I'm looking for portability, good images (for me, meaning, a RAW file to be fixed up later), and enough speed to work as a moment catcher. (For reference, the camera I used to use most in this mode was a little Rollei 35.) Where the G1X fails rather completely is as a moment catcher. First the good: The chip in this camera is amazing. Nearly as good as on my 5D. The lens is also very sharp across its usable range. I like the design. The weight and feel are right, with the hand grip providing a perfect control surface. I have always worn small cameras around my neck, so the size and weight here are just fine by me. I don't want something to shove in my pocket. I want a good camera, at the ready, that won't have me fatigued by the end of the day. The G1X succeeds here. If you have 30 seconds to unfold the screen, power the thing up, compose on the screen, prefocus, and shoot, you will get nice photos with this. Of course, that means you're pretty much limited to using this as a glorified camera phone, shooting only inanimate objects or groups of people standing there waiting for the shutter to snap. That's what mass-appeal pocket cameras are good for already, so I expected more from this one, and alas, didn't get it. I have, over the years, used my G9 both in slowpoke/tourist/line-em-up-and-shoot-em mode, but it was also a decent little street photography camera, and good enough for basic moment capturing. You could stick it up to your eye and use the (yes, very limited) eyepiece to frame up most of the scene, and shoot. The shot wasn't lightning quick, and you had to extrapolate where the actual coverage was going to be from the 75% or so that the viewfinder covered, but it worked OK. The G1X fails completely here, for several reasons. One is that the focus doesn't work for squat if you have the screen closed up. Facial-recognition focus (one of the high points of the camera when in screen-shooting mode) doesn't work unless the screen is open. Using intelligent field focus also, for me, yielded horrible results with the screen closed. The camera was constantly back focused, even when I was a reasonable distance from subjects so that viewfinder/lens parallax shouldn't have been an issue. Worst of all, by far, is the atrocious close focusing distance with the G1X. I do a fair amount of shooting within a couple feet of the subject to be focused. The G1X consistently misses these subjects unless swapped into macro mode, and by the time you've done that, you've lost your moment. I'm not kidding when I say this is atrocious. The distance at which you need to swap it into macro mode seems to be nearly 1 meter. Oddly enough, if you use the camera in green, "idiot" mode, it's smart enough to flip into macro mode on its own. But if you do that, tough luck on the RAW images. You don't get to record RAWs unless you're not in idiot mode. Even in macro mode, the close focusing distance is way too far off. I don't expect this to be a macro camera. But I do once in a while shoot a semi-close-up of foliage or sculptural details when on vacation or out for a walk, and whereas you could get a suitable close-up with the G9, you can't get anywhere near the subject with the G1X. A foot or more away from the front element (while zoomed back at the widest angle setting) is the best you can do. I mentioned the sloppy handling. I think Canon really tips its hand on the end market when you consider that under your thumb, where a real camera would have some kind of switch of importance, this one has a video recording button. I could not possibly care less about recording video, so this is a complete waste to me. I didn't think it would be a potential deal-breaker until I began using the camera where my muscle memory from using my other Canons (and other cameras) constantly had me using my thumb to try to focus (5D) or lock exposure (other Canons) and I would get a video started. Meanwhile, the real controls for picture making (AE lock, focus point) are too far down, around the control dial, and not easy to feel. The control dial itself is an amazing failure in engineering. It's concentric with a circular, 4-way control pad, yet the control dial ALSO works when pressed as a 4-way control pad. That's bad, because its surface isn't gnarled enough and the force necessary to depress it (the dial) is so light that you CANNOT normally use it as a dial. The very act of trying to spin it requires enough thumb force to depress it, registering functions or settings you don't want. This is a horrible, horrible mistake, one that will be most obvious to users of Canon's SLRs, where the control dial is a dial. I pre-ordered this camera, and wanted to love it. The reality of using it on a vacation was that, within 2 days, I was so frustrated with the slow handling and with missing photos that I stuffed it in my backpack and stopped making pictures. That, to me, is the mark of a failed camera. Luckily for me, during this vacation, I stumbled by a store that had a Fujifilm Finepix X100 in the window, and familiar with it (I was considering it before I settled on the G1X), I went in to try it out. I determined very quickly that the X100 was a vastly superior platform for capturing moments and people, even though its autofocus is slower and more limted than the G1Xs, and even though it has only the single-length lens. The G1X remained in my backpack the rest of the trip, while I racked up many great images on the X100 thanks to its excellent handling and superior low-light performance. My recommendation: If you are looking for something that handles with the relative slowness of, say, an old, medium-format twin-lens reflex camera, or you shoot only stationary subjects for the most part, then you may love the G1X. If you are looking for a "street photography" camera, something for shooting people, something that handles like a real camera rather than a high-status, hybrid toy, stay away and look into something like the Fujifilm x100 which, for all its quirks, is a much more serious still camera.