Canon Powershot G1x Review: Street Legal

Packaging

The G1x comes in a big cuboid cardboard box. Inside the box you’ll find the camera body and the battery pack, interface cable, strap, charging adapter with cable and manuals.

Design and built

The G1x is built like a tank with a mixture of mostly metal with glass of the monitor and rubber patches on the holds. It feels heavier than the 534gm weight mentioned (including battery and card) so I would use my left hand to stable the cam under low-light. It’s a solid body and should survive any unintentional falls easily. The hinge by which the articulating monitor is connected to the body is also solidly built.

Front: Front dial, auto-focus assist lamp, lens with the lens ring and the ring release button

Back: 3-inch articulating LCD, short-cut/direct print button, viewfinder with diopter dial and two indicators, playback button, record button, AF frame selector button, AE/FE lock button, control dial with function set button, metering and menu buttons

Top: Pop-out flash, accessory shoe, stereo micophones, mode dial on top of the exposure compensation dial, shutter release button with the zoom lever, power button, two eyelets

Bottom: Tripod mount, battery and SD card compartment

Right: miniUSB, miniHDMI and remote terminal compartment

Left: Speaker

This is a perfect camera that can

And hey, we love the attached lens cap!

User Interface

Once pass the HS system startup screen (you can change it btw in menu), you’ll be greeted with the familiar electronic display with current settings info all over. Add the histogram, grid lines and a unique but very useful tilt scale by tapping the display button. The tilt scale will let you know whether your camera is straight or bent. Don’t worry, once you half-press the SR button to focus, the info on the top of the screen disappear and only a bottom line remains to tell you the ND filter status, metering, A, S, Exp and ISO. You can customize the display in camera settings.

First thing you want to do is to go to Menu and set it according to your preferences. You have various shooting settings as well as camera settings here. You can also set your favourite settings in one menu and make it default to appear when you press Menu.

Aim at the subject and half-press the SR button to focus first and then shoot. Drag the zoom lever to zoom in and out within the range of 4x optical and a total of 16x optical+digital zoom range. You can quickly change various settings like focus modes (normal, macro, manual), flash modes (off, auto, always on, slow synchro), ISO and display from the multi-functional dial. The function set button sits in between with the help of which you can switch various shooting functions like WB, ISO, colours, bracketing, dynamic range correction, no. of shots per click, self-timer, ,metering, ND filter, aspect ratio, still output format, still and video resolution. These options might become unavailable according to the shooting mode you’ve set on the mode dial.

Modes

The mode dial sits on top of an exposure compensation dial. There are the usual Auto, P, Av (Aperture priority), Tv (Shutter priority) and M modes. There are a couple of C modes which let you assign a custom setting each for your convenience.

Then there’s the movie mode followed by scene and filter modes. In each of these modes, press function set key to change through options.

Usability

The Powershot G1x boasts of so many buttons and dials that are enough to push you back in fear at the first look. Couple it with the don’t-mess-with-me look and its kinda get intimidating! But then, slowly pet the beast and spend some time with it – you’ll know how cool actually the whole set-up is! There is an one-touch dedicated exposure compensation, AF frame selection, AE/FE lock button, ISO, metering and then three multi-functional shortcut keys – try beating that!

Connectivity

You have the usual wired data transfer feature. There’s no infrared for remote control.

Performance

System

The camera is very fast and smooth to operate with absolutely no lag. There’s almost 0 shutter lag on shooting a picture. Equally fast is the start of the movie recording.

Still

Colours are true and properly saturated at most settings. RGB is good with Red is slightly oversaturated.

Low-light performance is exceptional despite of an f/2.8 lens. Check out the photos below and you’ll see even at an ISO as high as 12800 the photo is actually quite sharable on web – incredible!

Video

The overall quality is good, but we found the continuous auto-focus to be a little slow. Also at 16x you see a lot of fuzziness but that’s expected as it’s the furthest of digital zoom.

Battery life

We got about 213 shots in RAW format without recording. With 30 mins recording the shots came down to about 170 odd which is, well, expected but overall not a great battery life.