With this Canon you Can (Canon Powershot G5)

Member Name: webfuz

Product:	Canon Powershot G5
Date:	20/02/04 (202 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well Built , Great Lense , Good Results

Disadvantages: Heavy, Some Fringing in High Contrast areas , average Software Bundle

My first impression of this camera is how good it feels in your hand. It feels solid and well made with a positive feel to the buttons.
It's no pocket camera it's one of the heaviest in this class (5MP)
The controls seem to be placed in "natural positions" and there are more buttons than most digital cameas which means you are less dependant on the menu system.
I am not going to go into all the technical specs, these are available in abundance elsewhere.
What is it like to use ?
Startup takes about 4 secs
Focusing is quick
Digital Cameras sometimes suffer from a problem called shutter lag ie, the time it takes between you pressing the shutter and the camera actually taking the shot. This is not to bad on this camera but I think It could be improved.
Picture are almost always well exposed,colours are very good but its well worth taking some time to learn how the camera focuses this could save time and frustration later, its usually very good especially outside in daylight but inside there are a few techniques you can use to improve things.
The 4x lense is very sharp and very fast ( Has a wide aperture) great for shooting in low light situations without a tripod.
The wide aperture on this lense however leads to a problem with areas of very high contrast, at wide apertures a purple or blue fringe appears as a thin line along the dark/light edge in the photo. Not fantastic but it disapears at smaller aperture sizes ( Below f 4.5)
The Viewfinder image is clipped in the corner by the lense barrel at wide angles.
Playback features a good way of enlarging images on the screen, great for checking the sharpness of a shot.
Battery life is much better than I expected. ( Lithium Type ) Check out ebay for even higher capacity cells ( about £18.00 at time of writing)
Filesize of pictures varies with jpgs up to about 2.5mb depending on the mode you choose raw files size is about 4.6mb. The raw images ca
n be difficult to open without canons own software installed. Photoshop CS supports the raw files, Photoshop 7 needs an expensize plugin in order to read the files. However this is only an issue when you need to extract every last ounce of quality and control.
All in all good camera for someone who cant afford a digital SLR but wants a high level of control.
E-Mail me for more info.

Summary: