My gig as Multimedia Producer for 2D-x.com allows me to meet some cool people–like the dudes from NerdBlerp.com. The Canon G11 and 430 EX II went to a birthday party of one of their members at Studio Square in Queens, NY. Performance wise: it had its ups and down.
All photos in this posting were not post-processed at all and were just resized for the web on top of slapping a watermark on them all.
For what it is, the photos that come straight out of the Canon G11 are pretty darn good. Sure, they can’t touch my 5D Mk II or 7D, but they’re not really supposed to be able to. In fact, they are ALMOST on par with the Micro Four Thirds line in low light. Post-processing would have been able to turn these images into wonderful photos but that can really be said for any modern digital camera.
The 430 EX II was coupled with the G11 for some of these photos. Using it actually disappointed me quite a bit. The camera cannot meter with the flash. That’s a major bummer, as it is the only point-and-shoot from Canon with a hot shoe and should be able to accommodate to Canon accessories with ease. It really baffled me as to why it didn’t. As a constructive criticism, I hope that Canon fixes this with later models. To be fair, some of the photos taken with the flash did come out looking fairly decent. However, one needs to be careful with it. Dialing the flash down to its lowest power setting can still not provide for usable results. Aiming the flash can be very key when using it.
The autofocus in the dimly lit beer garden was spot on in situations where my 5D MK II may struggle at times when coupled with lower end lenses. Because of this feat, I was very impressed with how it did in this situation. Take into consideration that we were in a place where there are many people moving in and around and all about. The G11 was still able to maintain sharp focus. The G11’s autofocus doesn’t seem to be any different than other point-and-shoots either; as far as I know that is.
The G11 is also fairly easy to use. I passed it around to one complete photo noob who set it in auto and just went to town taking photos. All of the photos with on-camera flash (you can clearly tell which ones those are by how much of a standard point-and-shoot look they have) were taken by him. He loved the adjustable screen, which really helped with composition. One girl took the camera and shot all manual (the way myself and most readers of this blog would.) The photos she took were really very nice. Both subjects tended to use the zoom on the camera. I didn’t really care much for it as I’ve been trained to comfortably zoom with my feet. Another reason for this is to maintain the wide-open F2.8 aperture allowed from the lens.
As a note of reference: when one takes the flash off on this camera, they can get very lovely photos. Otherwise, it’s just like any other point-and-shoot.
More to come in the review.
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