Xavier Rival wrote:
Gives them the chance to buy an additional front lens for wide angle (these screw on accessories they can get a lot of money for).
Nope, I had a G7 and the wide angle adapter. That thing was huge! I realized that if I was going to carry that rig, I might as well carry a DSLR... So I sold them and bought the excellent Leica D-Lux3. It has wide angle, RAW, manual controls, all in a body that weighs half of the G7! Why would I put anything else in my pocket! I'm a Canon guy, but until they make a "G9 Wide Angle", I won't go to them for my little camera.
kapytalyst wrote:
Totally agree with that one. Looks like my old Pro1 dodged yet another bullet.
You hit the nail on the head with this one. I think that many, given the chance, would select the Pro1 over many of these newer replacements. The G9 just isn't up to the same level.
The Pro1 has almost everything I want in a small, non DSLR camera; RAW, L lens with 28mm-200mm FL coverage, 8MP, takes CF cards and the same battery as the 5d, takes standard 58mm filters, and the list continues. It has 3 major drawbacks though: 1) it uses a Sony sensor (noisy above ISO 50/100), 2) it uses an EVF, and 3) it only shoots at 2FPS.
Sadly Canon has never equaled the Pro1 and it's a shame they discontinued it. I understand that it didn't fit the line up anymore after the price of the XT/XTi dropped to the point where the Pro1 wasn't justified.
You know, I had looked at the Leica D-Lux3 and its panasonic variant. They both seem to offer the same noise issues, and sometimes even worst at low ISO that what the dpreview samples do for the G9. Also, does anyone know if there is a waterproof housing for the Leica/panasonic?
As I said above, I looked at two raw files from a D-Lux3 shot at ISO 100. The noise was horrible. While I like the idea of the wider lens on the Leica, I found the files unacceptable. I am looking forward to reading the reviews on the G9. I would prefer a wider lens, but I can live with it if the files are reasonably clean. The samples at dpreview looked decent.
UCSB wrote:
I've been looking at the F50fd ... the new Fuji ... and it is probably going to be noisy also. There are several images from the pre-release cameras floating around and I actually think that these Canon images may be better. But, the Fuji deserves to be evaluated on a real production camera. At $300, the Fuji is $200 cheaper than this Canon and doesn't have RAW.
I had also looked at this. I think then the right answer is to snap up an f31fd while they are still around. it has great IQ and it will undoubtedly do better than the f50 on high ISO performance. Otherwise, the differences are basically the IS (or whatever they call it).
Ok first post in a long time but:
I'm glad they put RAW back in - I need to upgrade my compact (Powershot A80) as work no longer lets us take their Powershot Pro's home. I've been so stuck in the DSLR world for the last couple of years I didn't even know what was out and what had what in the land of compacts and point and shoots, 2 days ago I walked in to a camera shop and asked to look at several compacts and chose the G7 because of EOS flash compatibility AND it had RAW, or so I thought, when the sales girl told me it didn't I handed it back to them and said "thanks, but no thanks".
also lets put some the stuff I've read here of this in to perspective:
lens range: yep I'd gladly trade 20 or 30mm effective off of the long end for 28mm effective but 35 is still very usable. When I transitioned from my film EOS 33 and 5 to my digital EOS D60 my main lens (a 28-70 2.8 L) was now a 45mm effective and my only wide angle option was to use a 14mm prime with an effective of 22... most of the time, unless I knew I was going to need it or when I was taking my large bag anyway, I couldn't be bothered taking my 14mm prime with me so I worked around the 45 effective "widest" angle that I had... 95% of the time it was workable, OK sometimes it required me to do more than .5 of a second of creative thinking but ....pffft heck that's why I do photography... so 35mm I can live with...just, maybe... well, sort of.
lens speed 2.8 not fast enough? damn I only WISH I had 2.8 on most of my zooms and historically most consumer fixed lens compacts even in the higher mid range even some with primes rather than zooms had lenses around 3.5 or 4.
OK so some of the earlier G's had faster lenses but they also had much smaller zoom ranges with much less glass inside so I'd trade gladly f2 3x zoom for 2.8 6x zoom (just I'd rather that zoom started wider).
Image noise? heck looking at those pictures in pdreview at 400iso it's actually better with less noise, and what noise there is being less offensive than my D60 DSLR at 400, it also takes a massive dump all over my A80 compact and looks better than my work's Powershot Pros, OK my 20D looks better at 800 and can often pull better at 1600.
BUT consider that this is a camera that's only a touch more expensive than the powershot A80 I bought 3 1/2 years ago, and despite having more than twice the pixel count has phenomenally lower noise at 400 than models like the A80 on righ dow at the pixel peaking level - resize down for screen or to print A4 or less and odds on you'd rarely ever really see a speck of it.
Also in concern to the above note that it has IS AND a proper hot shoe so you have 2 stops of ISO from the optical IS that you can save (except in action shots) taking shots at 100 ISO that you would normally have needed 400iso for and of you are an EOS user you probably have an EX flash already (and I can see 3 on my desk) for extra light for a lot of shots. If I was at a kids party or family BBQ I know I'd rather lug around and use a compact like this with my smallest flash (420EX) than my DSLR.... which even then I'd want the flash mounted to the DSLR for catchlights.
Now if I had bought a Powershot Pro, or a G5 or 6 in the past couple of years I wouldn't even be bothered looking at this camera, sure I like gadgets (sitting here typing on my brand new Apple Aluminum keyboard as I am) but lets face it upgrading every camera model release is just plumb crazy insanity (though it allows the likes of me to pick up "obsolete cast offs" for a song - so thank you very much if you're that sort of crazy in the coconut type person) I figure on 3 years for consumer items like this and 5 for SLR's so really for someone following that upgrade path this is almost a quantum leap, but it's crazy talk to have slapped down cold hard cash 6 or so months ago on the "old model" and then talk about how "given how little it's improved" over your "obsolete model" leaves you a bit cold on upgrading.... just hold off for the G11 or 12 or something OK?
The lack of noise in the higher ISO shots is due to the heavy noise reduction that Canon employs in the G9. You don't see the noise, but you do see the distinct, and in some cases, severe loss of detail. Looks at first like the image is sort of soft, but it really isn't.
That said, at low to medium ISO, it is really quite incredible. I pulled down one of the full sized jpgs and applied a tiny bit of USM and the detail just jumped off the screen. Very impressive. I'm sure if I played with channel contrast, I could get it to pop even more.
I think the images at most ISO settings up to and including 400, would print very nicely at 8x10 and probably still be great at 11x14. The low ISO shots would be great even larger.
The Leica isn't any more noisy than the G7 or G9. They do handle noise processing differently though. But the real advantage of the Dlux3 of course is that you can shoot RAW and do your own noise processing. I had a G7, and now have a DLux3. The RAW files I process myself are much more pleasing than the in-camera JPG processing of the Canon, especially using Noise Ninja for higher ISOs. Here are a few samples from my DLux3. The wide format perspective is soooo much better for this type of work than a 35mm equivalent lens:
And the ultimate noise test, a dark, long exposure. This one was 8 seconds at ISO100, and I did not do any noise reduction other than ACR's default RAW conversion process:
The G9 RAW has a catch! Check specifications of G9 on Canon USA website and you might be surprised to note that the size of a G9 RAW image is a whooping 17 mb (compared to the average 7.5mb RAW file a 305D / Rebel XT gives). I think that's way too heavy if not for memory cards, for processing images at least. Also, Adobe RGB colour space would've 'completed' the camera but it seems to offer only sRGB mode. Nevertheless, I'm still drooling over it....
I just picked up a Fuji F31fd and I'm thrilled with it. It's simple, yet still gives you decent manual controls. I took a shot at ISO 1600 last night and there was some IQ degradation, but in terms of noise, it looked better than my 1D!
You can find them for $200 a pop and at that price, why not get two, just in case!?
The G9 looks very impressive though. Perhaps a G9 for daytime shots and a F31 for indoor/nighttime and you've got a great combo.
Mayank B wrote:
The G9 RAW has a catch! Check specifications of G9 on Canon USA website and you might be surprised to note that the size of a G9 RAW image is a whooping 17 mb (compared to the average 7.5mb RAW file a 305D / Rebel XT gives). I think that's way too heavy if not for memory cards, for processing images at least. Also, Adobe RGB colour space would've 'completed' the camera but it seems to offer only sRGB mode. Nevertheless, I'm still drooling over it....
Why is that too heavy for memory cards or anything else? That's not a whole lot different from the file size I get out of my 5D. That's 120 images on a 2GB and 240 images on a 4GB. Disk space is dirt cheap - who cares? Remember the days of 36 shots on a role of film?
You can convert color spaces in post if necessary. Also not a big deal.
You can convert sRGB to Adobe, but because it's a smaller color space you can't put back the colors that aren't there. It's like converting an 8-bit file to 16-bit; you get a bigger file but you don't get any more information.
Ariel Bravy wrote:
I just picked up a Fuji F31fd and I'm thrilled with it. It's simple, yet still gives you decent manual controls. I took a shot at ISO 1600 last night and there was some IQ degradation, but in terms of noise, it looked better than my 1D!
You can find them for $200 a pop and at that price, why not get two, just in case!?
The G9 looks very impressive though. Perhaps a G9 for daytime shots and a F31 for indoor/nighttime and you've got a great combo.
Nill Toulme wrote:
You can convert sRGB to Adobe, but because it's a smaller color space you can't put back the colors that aren't there. It's like converting an 8-bit file to 16-bit; you get a bigger file but you don't get any more information.
Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if there are 8 bits representing the color, then if the adobe color space is larger it just means that the steps between colors is larger i.e. each step is a larger step in adobe than in sRGB.
Nill Toulme wrote:
You can convert sRGB to Adobe, but because it's a smaller color space you can't put back the colors that aren't there. It's like converting an 8-bit file to 16-bit; you get a bigger file but you don't get any more information.
Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
Is this really true? Because I can have my 20D set to sRGB but shoot Raw and set Camera Raw to Adobe RGB and I believe I get a good Adobe RGB TIFF file. Is this not correct? Do I need to set my camera to Adobe RGB?
John, the 8-bit --> 16-bit comment was just by way of analogy. Just as you can't create data by converting an 8-bit file to a 16-bit file, you can't create missing colors by converting an sRGB file to Adobe RGB. You're just putting the same data in a larger container.
Patrick, if you're shooting RAW it doesn't matter. RAW is RAW. But if you're shooting jpg and intend to work in Adobe RBG, then you should set your camera to that space.
sorry this is slightly off topic but th elast post caught my eye about size - quality and colour settings...I have always had my 1D mk2 set on set1 on the colour matrix - would my pictures be any better if it was set to adobe RGB??
