The Canon PowerShot G1

Last Updated 29 Mar 03
Copyright 2003 by Stephen Vermeulen

Introduction

The digital camera market place is currently (January 2001) split into the following segments (prices in Canadian $, to convert to US$ divide by 1.5): There are a lot of different options available among these cameras and market segments that can make a purchase decision quite difficult.  This page is an attempt to capture some of the decision making process that I went though when selecting my Canon G1.

Photography Types

In the past 20 years with 35mm based equipment (an old Pentax Spotmatic SLR and a Pentax point and shoot 35mm with 3x zoom) the majority of my photography has fallen into the following areas: While I have shot a fair amount of sports and candids, this was mainly done in my high school year book days, so is not something I do on a regular basis. I have found that a 28-135mm zoom on my 35mm SLR was about the ideal lens (except for its great weight, size and relatively slow speed) for this combination of photography. In fact, I found that the Pentax point and shoot, which has about a 28-105mm lens, was an almost complete replacement for the old SLR, what little bit it lacked in image quality or manual controls, it made up for in portability - so it got used a lot more. I have also done a number of larger than 8x10 enlargements, so wanted something that had enough quality to do a nice 11x14 or larger.

Features

Given this set of requirements I came up with the following initial features list: Most of the current crop of 3M pixel cameras provided most of these features so choosing amongst them was somewhat difficult. In the end I rather arbitrarily narrowed my search to the main camera name brands (Canon, Nikon, Fuji and Olympus) plus Sony and Toshiba since these were all available at local retailers. After some initial consideration I eliminated: That left the following five cameras as the serious candidates: For reviews, sample photos and feature comparisions these are the main sites I looked at: At this point I eliminated:

The Final Decision

Now it was just down to the Nikon 990 and the Canon G1. At this point I compared the remaining feature differences between the two and viewed many of the published sample pictures.  I even printed a couple of pictures on my Epson PhotoStylus EX to see if the printed quality was really as good as people were claiming (I found that my printer was the limiting factor below 11x14 size). As far as the features went the G1 only had a few things the 990 didn't (and the reverse was true too).  The three that interested me the most were: Of these, the one that made up my mind was the compact flash type 2 compatibility. I figured that for a typical vacation I would need to be able to save about 300 pictures (on past experience of a roll of film per day), which at about 1Meg per picture would mean I would have to buy about 300Meg of CF cards.  At today's prices in Canada that amounts to about $1200 for storage. Upon further investigation I found that the price of a 340Meg microdrive was about $460, or a 1Gig unit for about $660.  Thinking that my past experience of about 1 roll of film per day of vacation might be a bit conservative I decided to go with the Canon G1 and the 1Gig microdrive. I realized that there were at least two ways out of this problem (appart from buying so much CompactFlash storage) if I went with the Nikon, I could take a laptop computer with me or I could get one of the digital wallet type devices (the Image tank, Digital Wallet or the Iomega FotoShow or Click solutions), but each was going to be yet more gear to carry along.

Conclusion

I am quite happy with the Canon G1, in fact I would probably be getting along just fine with either the Nikon or Olympus. There are two things about the Canon that I particularly like now I have it, which I did not consider important in my initial decision:

Other Considerations

If you are into animal, bird or perhaps sports photography then take a look into the Olympus C-2100UZ which has a stabilized 10 times optical zoom in a 2M pixel camera. When Olympus brings one of these out with a 3M or higher sensor and microdrive compatibility (which is almost what the Canon is doing with the just-announced PowerShot Pro 90IS) its going to be a really tempting choice. I played with one a friend has, and found the image stabilization feature to be very useful for indoor natural light photography as well (it might eliminate the need for a tripod), even if you are not interested in the long telephoto applications.
 

External Flash Units

The Canon Speedlite 420EX is a very nice unit, but its a bit on the expensive side, especially if you don't do much flash photography, or would like to be able to use the flash with another camera. These web sites discuss using other external flashes with the G1 and other cameras:

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