46 out of 46 people found this review helpful.
This Will Do Until a Great Camera Comes Along
Date of Review: Jul 10, 2007
The Bottom Line: I like the G7 but there is still room for improvement, particularly at this price point. Still, it's a fine camera with a lot of flexibility.
I've been looking for the perfect compact camera, one that is small enough to easily carry but powerful enough to take excellent pictures. So far, the Canon PowerShot G7 comes close. The G7 is a buy; however, there is still room for improvement.
What It Is
The Canon PowerShot G7 is a compact digital camera with 10 megapixels of resolution. It has a 6x optical zoom lens and a 2.5-inch LCD screen that can be used as a viewfinder or to review shots. The G7 is a little big for a compact camera and it strains the upper limit of the "compact camera" category. It will fit in a jacket pocket but will not go in a pants pocket. It is hefty but it's a solid-feeling heft that gives the impression of high quality.
Set for its highest resolution, the G7 takes images of 3648 x 2736 pixels, good enough for a 12-inch wide magazine picture at standard publishing resolution of 300 dots per inch. The G7 can be used in fully automatic mode, or nearly all of its settings can be adjusted. One of the big adjustments on the G7 is its sensitivity (called "ISO") setting, which has its own adjustment knob atop the camera. A physical control for ISO is unheard of in a compact camera, and even some fancy SLR cameras do not have it. Using this control, ISO can be quickly set to 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 or automatic. I almost always keep the camera on 100 and will discuss this further in a moment.
I mentioned the 2.5-inch LCD screen. The G7 also has an optical viewfinder, which I appreciate having. One other feature that is unusual for a compact camera is the full flash hot-shoe on top of the G7. Yes, the G7 will work with a variety of Canon and third-party flash units, and it can automatically set flash strength with several flash units.
The G7 takes a proprietary battery that is not cheap -- I bought a spare battery for $51. The basic camera comes with a battery, charger, neck strap and a skimpy 32 MB SD card for picture storage. I found the neck strap to be too bulky and I swapped it for a wrist strap. Although the battery will fully charge in less than two hours, having a spare battery makes it easy to swap batteries on the fly for little down time.
Taking Pictures
With a 6x optical zoom, the G7 gives me a lot of flexibility about taking pictures. Generally, zooming all the way in gets me about as close as I want to get. However, I wish the lens was wider at the wide end. With the optical stabilization (anti-shake) turned on, the camera really allows me to zoom all the way in and take clear pictures. I have a Canon PowerShot A700 that does not have optical stabilization and it is always fuzzy at maximum zoom. The G7 is much better in this regard. I've had another camera with image stabilization that worked only when there was sufficient light. The Canon G7 is superior in that its image stabilization works whenever it is selected, even in low light. It really makes a difference.
In general, photos come out well focused and crisp. With 10 megapixels to work with, I can crop images substantially and still end up with a picture suitable for publishing. Unlike my other cameras, the flash on the G7 tends to not blow out flesh tones, so there's less of that annoying glare on faces. Colors are bright and the camera generally does a good job of getting the exposure correct. When I process pictures from the G7 in Photoshop, I usually have to tweak the contrast a bit to make the blacks in the image blacker. This is the only regular flaw with the G7's exposure. I'm fussy about focus and the G7's automatic focus reliably focuses very well.
On the other hand, the camera's red-eye setting is not very effective. I must use Photoshop to eliminate red eye, even with the camera's red-eye feature selected.
I make frequent use of the G7's ability to adjust many of its parameters, including exposure and flash strength. I have tried to focus manually but have not gotten the hang of it. However, it is easy to adjust exposure and flash strength with the G7 and this allows me to get shots that would never work in fully automatic mode. In general, I use the flash a lot more than most people and seldom turn it off.
Lag between shots on the G7 is pretty good, although it sometimes varies for reasons I don't understand. Lag between flash shots is 3-4 seconds, pretty good for a compact camera. Without the flash, there is usually less lag, sometimes less than one second. However, other times it seems to take a while for the G7 to focus, making for frustratingly long lag times. This doesn't happen often but it does happen.
One of my favorite features on this camera is the knob for setting the camera's ISO or sensitivity. This knob does not function in the camera's "Auto" mode, but it works in all other settings. At 80 or 100 ISO, the camera is both reasonably sensitive and has low noise. I recently shot hundreds of pictures at ISO 100 and was very pleased with the exposure and low noise in the images. However, there is considerably more noise (grain) in images from the G7 than there is from my much-more-expensive Nikon D200 digital-SLR camera. This noise is not a problem for snapshots or even publishable pictures but it will become visible on larger prints. At ISO 200, the noise increases and it's easily visible at ISO 400 and higher. I use ISO 400 and higher only when there is no other option for taking the picture. If you have a G7, don't kid yourself that its noise/grain performance is similar to a digital-SLR camera. It is not similar and it's not even close.
I've also taken several videos with this camera and they work well if you understand the camera's limitations. First, there are several resolution settings for video, topping out at 1,024 x 768 pixels, which is pretty close to an HD-quality image. Unfortunately, 1,024 x 768 video resolution has a frame rate of 15 frames per second (fps), instead of 30 fps that standard North American video (both HD and SD) has. You can get 30 fps with the G7 with 640 x 480 resolution, which is nice... but not HD.
Once you have the resolution set, you must understand that you cannot use the optical zoom once you start shooting video. I don't know why, but the optical zoom will not work when the camera is recording video. (I think the lens will make some physical noise when zooming, so that's why zoom is disabled, but I'm not sure about this.) Audio is recorded fairly well, particularly if I'm within four to eight feet of the subject. The closer the better in this regard. I load the videos into my Windows XP computer and edit them with Microsoft's MovieMaker, which is simple but effective.
One other tip about shooting video with the G7: Once you start shooting, focus will not automatically adjust. I recently shot a video that had rather soft focus and was disappointed that it never adjusted as the scene progressed. Therefore, be sure the camera is focused correctly before you start recording a video. Videos are saved as AVI files, and rather big ones at that.
With 10-megapixel images, pictures from the G7 consume a lot of space. A 1 GB SD chip stores about 235 pictures at the camera's highest setting, which is fine for my needs. Each image is around 3-4 MB, depending on the content.
Getting to some selections in the camera's menus takes a certain amount of digging. One example is the "Format" command to clean the memory chip. I use this regularly and it's annoying that I have to scroll WAY down the screen to find it. It's not a biggie, however. Another negative is that images have some purple fringing in high-contrast situations. Again, it's not huge but it's there.
Even with my heavy use of the G7's flash and frequent reviews of the pictures on the camera's nice LCD screen, I get at least 350 shots from a full charge. This is about two days of photos during my busiest shooting days, which I think is excellent.
Summary
I paid $550 for my Canon G7, so I'm inclined to like it. However, there is no doubt that it makes better pictures than my old Canon A700. What would make it perfect? I'd like to see AA batteries (instead of proprietary), a couple ounces less weight, less purple fringing and a wider wide-angle range on the lens. Reducing image noise is also high on my list of wants.
I've had my G7 for about five months now and it has been reliable and fun to use. It also takes pretty darn good pictures. The G7 is a capable compact camera and I recommend it.
