This photo was taken only a few feet away from where I took the test shots for the G9/E-500/P200 comparison. This demonstrates that if you walk a few feet, point the camera in a different direction, and maybe wait for better light, you then have a whole new picture.
This photo was taken with my Canon G9 at a 36.78mm focal length, which is equivalent to 174mm on a full frame camera.
Whether or not the G9’s 6X zoom range, from 35mm to 210mm (equivalent) is a good thing or a bad thing is much debated on internet photography forums. There exist the purists who believe that any focal length unobtainable by a Leica rangefinder is just a useless gimmick. They believe that a camera with a zoom range from 28mm to 90mm would be a much more desirable camera. Or even better, just a camera with a 28mm prime lens such as the overpriced Sigma DP1 (because zoom is evil and you are supposed to zoom with your feet). Well if I had the camera that the purists say I would be better off with, then I wouldn’t have been able to get this particular shot (or I only would have gotten it with considerable cropping). From the way I’m looking at things, the longer zoom makes the G9 a much more versatile camera than previous cameras in the Canon G series.
This shot also demonstrates an amazing feature of the G9: image stabilization. The traditional rule is that the minimum safe shutter speed when handholding the camera is the reciprocal of the focal length. Under that rule, I would have had to take this photo at a shutter speed of 1/174 second. But in fact, it was taken at 1/25 second, which is about three stops slower than the recommended safe shutter speed. Yet the photo shows no camera shake blur (at least none that I noticed). This is quite amazing! If I was using my supposedly more versatile Olympus E-500 DSLR, in order to get this shot I first would have had to change lenses (in order to obtain the telephoto focal length), and then I would have had to turn the ISO up to 800 in order to get the necessary shutter speed. At ISO 800, the E-500 has more noise than the G9 at ISO 80. Thus the G9, in this particular situation, is actually a better low light camera than the DSLR with its much bigger sensor. This is the power of image stabilization, and I am now a believer. Never again will I buy a camera without this feature.
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The photo has annoying sharpening halos. I will write about why that happened in a future post.
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