A lot of money for less than outstanding quality (Canon Powershot G10)

Member Name: windhouse

Product:	Canon Powershot G10
Date:	04/06/09 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Panoramic and wide-angle images

Disadvantages: no paper manual, poor build quality

Having had several Canon Ixuses and loved them, I went for the G10 to provide a lightweight and more compact alternative to an SLR for a three week holiday in New Zealand. It performed pretty brilliantly for a compact right underneath waterfalls at Milford Sound - at 1/500 sec and various ISO values these images are superb and a lot of water spray seems to have done it no harm. In general use for scenery I really like the panoramic option as well as the comparatively wide angle of the lens.

It's definitely too heavy and bulky to live permanently in a trouser pocket, and swinging on a neck strap when I was rock climbing needed care and anchoring out of the way, but it was a competent general-purpose camera. That is, for still pictures. Oh dear. The movie mode had a built-in 'feature' - the colours were reversed, so all my videos went in the bin. According to the store where I bought the camera, this is a "feature" but, - who on earth would want magenta coloured grass and if you are so inclined I'd have thought you would use editing programs on your computer. But they couldn't find a way of unsetting the feature, and couldn't tell me how it had come to be set like this in the first place. So back the camera went to Canon for a month. They also fixed a few other faults - the build quality was poor, the rings around the lens fell off, fortunately on a town street and not half-way up a mountain, and the on-off button is so little raised from the body that it is annoying and not easy to press just right.

A lot of editing software now exists built in to the camera. So on holiday you can alter the lighting if your pictures are too dark, or vice versa, instead of waiting to edit on a computer. I suppose this is the way gadgets are going, but I don't have much use for it. I would have preferred them to spend this money on an included paper and ink manual. Not everything is intuitive, and the sections of online manual I had printed and taken with me weren't enough on the day.

So - after 4 brilliant digital Canon cameras I'm disappointed. Maybe I just got a Friday afternoon one, but from my experience the G10 is overhyped and overpriced.

Summary: Not one of Canon's best offerings

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