There’s a new Canon G10 camera, so sadly my G9 is no longer the latest and greatest. I doubt I will be buying the new G10, not because it’s not a worthy camera, but because I don’t even use the G9 much anymore. As you can tell by the lack of blog posts, I haven’t been interested in photography these days. This is because I’ve been busy programming a new online dating site, and there’s only so much free time for hobbies.
There seem to be two major differences between the G9 and the G10. The most significant is that the lens, instead of being 35mm to 210mm, is now 28mm to 140mm. People who were clamoring for more wide angle will be happy. There were times when using the G9 that I wished I had more wide angle. On the other hand, I have taken some cool photos at greater than 140mm. This photo was taken at 175mm.
I think the real purpose of changing the lens is to give owners of the G9 some reason to spend money on a G10. If it had the same lens, there wouldn’t be much of a reason to upgrade.
The other notable difference is that the number of megapixels has increased from 12.1 MP to 14.7MP. On internet message forums, there are anti-megapixel types who complain about cameras having too many megapixels and that the extra megapixels,ironically, decrease the image quality. However, in my famous camera comparison, I demonstrated that the 12MP Canon G9 definitely picks up a lot more detail than the an 8MP DSLR with a much bigger sensor. So although this camera definitely has some diffraction issues, as I demonstrated here and here, I am sure that the extra 2.6MP will result in some increased image detail if the new lens is a quality lens. The extra MP probably won’t make the G10 images any noisier than the G9 images, because improvements in noise tend to coincide with improvements in pixel density. Indeed, the G9 has the least noisy ISO 400 of any non-DSLR camera I’ve ever owned, even though it also has more megapixels than any camera I’ve ever owned.
Some minor differences include an extra manual dial on the top of the camera for exposure compensation—I’m not sure if this would make the G10 easier to use because now the ISO dial has moved to what looks like a less convenient spot. Another minor difference is that the G10 uses “Canon’s new DIGIC 4 image processor.” I have no idea what that means for actual photo quality.
I see a lot of pros nowadays using G10s as their point and shoot and my wife wants a point and shoot now... so.. hmmm.
Posted by: daniel | January 17, 2009 at 01:54 PM