A couple of hours ago the Canon Man came to my house and delivered two small boxes. One for me and one for a friend. When I opened them these are what they were:
I apologize for the poor quality pictures but they were shot with my old Powershot S3IS which I have just donated to my daughter. I didn't bother to post process this picture and simply cropped them as I was too excited to go and play with my new toy. Maybe tomorrow I'll try and replace the first picture.
BTW, I've just also bought an 8 Gig Sandisk SD Card for just over a hundred Ringgit. Memory cards are really cheap these days. With 8 Gigs, and a Superfine Large JPG setting I can get more than 1250 shots. If I shoot in RAW at 15 MB per frame, the 8 Gigs SD card will give me 385 frames. Maybe I should go and buy a couple more of these cards.
Here are three cutout views of my sexy Powershot G10
The top of the camera has a dedicated +3 to -3 Exposure compensation dial. There is also a dedicated ISO dial from ISO 80 to ISO 3200 (Hi). The flash socket can accommodate my EX580 flash unit, and also my ST E2 Remote Speedlite Transmitter. An interesting accessory for the G10 is an underwater casing that can withstand a depth of 120 feet.
If you look at the Mode dial on the top right of centre, at 7 o'clock there is an interesting Panorama Assist feature. I played with it quickly. When this click is selected, you can shoot up to 26 panorama frames, and the LCD screen displays the previous image such that you can then visually align the next shot, and every succeeding shot, with the previous shot, which is displayed on the LCD screen even when you are in shooting mode. Really neat. I'll try and do a test pano shot tommorow and post it here.
I like the layout of the controls at the back. It feels as intuitive as my 1DsM2. The three tiered controls have three layers. The lowest layer is a twist dial to select pictures in view mode. Then there is a 4 way rocker switch for Macro, Flash, Self timer and Manual Focus button. The Function Set button is in the center. Around this cluster are the four buttons for Display, Menu, AF or Auto Focus Frame Selector and the Metering Light and Jump Button. The AF Frame selector allows you to move the focus square to any point on the screen, almost like selecting the red focusing and auto exposure reading dot in Kwanon DSLRs. So you no longer need to half press the shutter button to lock focus and reframe. There is also a dedicated playback button and a AE/FE lock button doubling also as the microphone record button. If you press this button after taking a shot, you can actually speak into the camera which will record an audio note in WAV format about the frame. Really useful feature for quick voice recordings to annotate your pictures without needing to use pen and paper. The WAV file will then be attached to that particular picture. Some potential uses are for you to read the GPS coordinates into the camera from your GPS capable handphone. Or if you are photographing a historical site, you can simply read the description notice board on site. I have this feature on my 1DsM2 and its one of the most used feature in my travel shooting enabling me to remember details about the shot even years after the event..
As it was nighttime I couldn't do any test shots in daylight, so I shot a hand held picture of Danny in available living room light at 1/60sec, f/4 and ISO 250 in JPG using the on board flash. This is frame number 0001 on 28 Oct 2008 from my virgin Powershot G10. No post processing was done. I simply reduced the size for uploading purposes:
Here is a 100% crop of Danny's sideburns as indicated in the white square above:
The resolution of the G10 lens appears to be quite good.
I wanted to see how good the lens and the IS was so I took another hand held shot without flash from about 12 feet away with optical zoom at 50%. The shutterspeed was 1/8 secs and aperture was f/4.5 at ISO 400. To steady the camera I rested both my elbows on my table. Here's the shot, and below it is the 100% crop without any post processing at all. It appears with the Image Stabilization facility I can get as much as a four F-stop advantage without the shakes. And if you look at the magnification, the lens seems really good, without any noticeable degradation of image quality. The letters size was less than 2 points and at 10 feet they still appear really sharp....and hand held too, mind you. Perhaps its my steady hands that are good and not the Image Stabilization technology of the G10.
After a couple of hours playing with it I am quite impressed with the little bugger.The movie function is superb. It can do 640x480 movies at 30 fps and the movie looks extremely smooth. Retail street price should be around RM1900 but if you shop around you probably can get a discount from that level.
I bought the G10 only because I wanted a P&S which can shoot in RAW. What I really would like to have is a Leica M8 but the cost of the M8 and a couple of Naughtyluxes would be more than sufficient to put one of my grandchildren through a local university degree course. In contrast, the under RM2k G10 has 15 Mega pixels which is almost the same size frame as my RM30K 1DsM2. That Luminous Landscape guy did a revealing comparison of an A3 print from the G10 and asked several experts to see if they can detect any difference against a print made with a RM120K Hessey Digital Back. And half the experts couldn't identify the G10 print. Maybe I should do a similar M8 vs G10 shootout. The G10 has the new Canon Digic 4 processor, so the in camera processing is fast and images so far looks superb. Tomorrow I'm going to test its landscape capability.
Some other features of the camera includes things like Face Self Timer where you put the camera on a tripod, select Face Self Timer, press a button, walk slowly (not run as usual) to join the group, or into the scene that you are shooting, turn your face towards the camera, and the bugger automatically locks focus onto the extra new face in the frame, and trips the shutter only after recognizing and making adjustments for the new face (yours) that has just appeared in the frame. Amazing. Now I'm only waiting for the G11 which I hope will include the strip-and-photograph-under-your-clothes technology that is already being deployed in security cameras at airport check-ins. That will be a really effective selling point.
There is a dedicated printing button too. After shooting a picture, you can press another dedicated special print button to put that particular frame into the print queue which you can then print directly with a pict-bridge compatible printer without even needing a computer. You can also do cropping and simple color and tone management in the camera itself.
I like the humongous 3 inch 461K dots LCD at the back of the camera. Its almost 3 times bigger and has a much higher resolution than the puny LCD of my RM30K 1DsM2. I also like the dedicated exposure compensation dials and the dedicated ISO dials which goes all the way up to 3200. I tried a shot at max 3200 ISO and a cursory examination showed a somewhat acceptable noise levels. I'll need to do more detailed tests to check out noise to ISO ratios. All the pictures above were shot in superfine JPGs and file sizes were only between 5 to 7 MB. G10 RAW algorithms are not yet available in Adobe Potatochop. I shot a coin in macro mode in RAW at less than 2 inches from the front of the lens. The picture size was 15.4 MB and opening it in Canon's DPP and importing into Potatochop instantly ballooned the file to 112 MB. I'll try and post some macro samples tomorrow. I remember our macro-guru Dr Chee used to produce really superb macros with an ancestor of the G10.
I'll try and write more as I play more with this little baby. So far, after 4 hours playing with it, I believe I'm really going to love this little fella.
I apologize for the poor quality pictures but they were shot with my old Powershot S3IS which I have just donated to my daughter. I didn't bother to post process this picture and simply cropped them as I was too excited to go and play with my new toy. Maybe tomorrow I'll try and replace the first picture.
BTW, I've just also bought an 8 Gig Sandisk SD Card for just over a hundred Ringgit. Memory cards are really cheap these days. With 8 Gigs, and a Superfine Large JPG setting I can get more than 1250 shots. If I shoot in RAW at 15 MB per frame, the 8 Gigs SD card will give me 385 frames. Maybe I should go and buy a couple more of these cards.
Here are three cutout views of my sexy Powershot G10
The top of the camera has a dedicated +3 to -3 Exposure compensation dial. There is also a dedicated ISO dial from ISO 80 to ISO 3200 (Hi). The flash socket can accommodate my EX580 flash unit, and also my ST E2 Remote Speedlite Transmitter. An interesting accessory for the G10 is an underwater casing that can withstand a depth of 120 feet.
If you look at the Mode dial on the top right of centre, at 7 o'clock there is an interesting Panorama Assist feature. I played with it quickly. When this click is selected, you can shoot up to 26 panorama frames, and the LCD screen displays the previous image such that you can then visually align the next shot, and every succeeding shot, with the previous shot, which is displayed on the LCD screen even when you are in shooting mode. Really neat. I'll try and do a test pano shot tommorow and post it here.
I like the layout of the controls at the back. It feels as intuitive as my 1DsM2. The three tiered controls have three layers. The lowest layer is a twist dial to select pictures in view mode. Then there is a 4 way rocker switch for Macro, Flash, Self timer and Manual Focus button. The Function Set button is in the center. Around this cluster are the four buttons for Display, Menu, AF or Auto Focus Frame Selector and the Metering Light and Jump Button. The AF Frame selector allows you to move the focus square to any point on the screen, almost like selecting the red focusing and auto exposure reading dot in Kwanon DSLRs. So you no longer need to half press the shutter button to lock focus and reframe. There is also a dedicated playback button and a AE/FE lock button doubling also as the microphone record button. If you press this button after taking a shot, you can actually speak into the camera which will record an audio note in WAV format about the frame. Really useful feature for quick voice recordings to annotate your pictures without needing to use pen and paper. The WAV file will then be attached to that particular picture. Some potential uses are for you to read the GPS coordinates into the camera from your GPS capable handphone. Or if you are photographing a historical site, you can simply read the description notice board on site. I have this feature on my 1DsM2 and its one of the most used feature in my travel shooting enabling me to remember details about the shot even years after the event..
As it was nighttime I couldn't do any test shots in daylight, so I shot a hand held picture of Danny in available living room light at 1/60sec, f/4 and ISO 250 in JPG using the on board flash. This is frame number 0001 on 28 Oct 2008 from my virgin Powershot G10. No post processing was done. I simply reduced the size for uploading purposes:
Here is a 100% crop of Danny's sideburns as indicated in the white square above:
The resolution of the G10 lens appears to be quite good.
I wanted to see how good the lens and the IS was so I took another hand held shot without flash from about 12 feet away with optical zoom at 50%. The shutterspeed was 1/8 secs and aperture was f/4.5 at ISO 400. To steady the camera I rested both my elbows on my table. Here's the shot, and below it is the 100% crop without any post processing at all. It appears with the Image Stabilization facility I can get as much as a four F-stop advantage without the shakes. And if you look at the magnification, the lens seems really good, without any noticeable degradation of image quality. The letters size was less than 2 points and at 10 feet they still appear really sharp....and hand held too, mind you. Perhaps its my steady hands that are good and not the Image Stabilization technology of the G10.
After a couple of hours playing with it I am quite impressed with the little bugger.The movie function is superb. It can do 640x480 movies at 30 fps and the movie looks extremely smooth. Retail street price should be around RM1900 but if you shop around you probably can get a discount from that level.
I bought the G10 only because I wanted a P&S which can shoot in RAW. What I really would like to have is a Leica M8 but the cost of the M8 and a couple of Naughtyluxes would be more than sufficient to put one of my grandchildren through a local university degree course. In contrast, the under RM2k G10 has 15 Mega pixels which is almost the same size frame as my RM30K 1DsM2. That Luminous Landscape guy did a revealing comparison of an A3 print from the G10 and asked several experts to see if they can detect any difference against a print made with a RM120K Hessey Digital Back. And half the experts couldn't identify the G10 print. Maybe I should do a similar M8 vs G10 shootout. The G10 has the new Canon Digic 4 processor, so the in camera processing is fast and images so far looks superb. Tomorrow I'm going to test its landscape capability.
Some other features of the camera includes things like Face Self Timer where you put the camera on a tripod, select Face Self Timer, press a button, walk slowly (not run as usual) to join the group, or into the scene that you are shooting, turn your face towards the camera, and the bugger automatically locks focus onto the extra new face in the frame, and trips the shutter only after recognizing and making adjustments for the new face (yours) that has just appeared in the frame. Amazing. Now I'm only waiting for the G11 which I hope will include the strip-and-photograph-under-your-clothes technology that is already being deployed in security cameras at airport check-ins. That will be a really effective selling point.
There is a dedicated printing button too. After shooting a picture, you can press another dedicated special print button to put that particular frame into the print queue which you can then print directly with a pict-bridge compatible printer without even needing a computer. You can also do cropping and simple color and tone management in the camera itself.
I like the humongous 3 inch 461K dots LCD at the back of the camera. Its almost 3 times bigger and has a much higher resolution than the puny LCD of my RM30K 1DsM2. I also like the dedicated exposure compensation dials and the dedicated ISO dials which goes all the way up to 3200. I tried a shot at max 3200 ISO and a cursory examination showed a somewhat acceptable noise levels. I'll need to do more detailed tests to check out noise to ISO ratios. All the pictures above were shot in superfine JPGs and file sizes were only between 5 to 7 MB. G10 RAW algorithms are not yet available in Adobe Potatochop. I shot a coin in macro mode in RAW at less than 2 inches from the front of the lens. The picture size was 15.4 MB and opening it in Canon's DPP and importing into Potatochop instantly ballooned the file to 112 MB. I'll try and post some macro samples tomorrow. I remember our macro-guru Dr Chee used to produce really superb macros with an ancestor of the G10.
I'll try and write more as I play more with this little baby. So far, after 4 hours playing with it, I believe I'm really going to love this little fella.
by digitalartist
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