Another Class-Leading Camera From Canon!

Author's Rating:

Pros: It has all the features you'll ever need & produces incredible pictures.

Cons: A little bulky and heavy for the casual user. No proper hand grip.

The Bottom Line: 
This is an incredible camera for the money. It is chuck full of features, much more than you'll ever need & it produces great photos.

Author's Review
I have been using the Canon G1 for about a year before I upgraded to the G2. Make no mistake about it - the G1 is a fantastic camera. I didn't think the guys at Canon would introduce a successor to the G1 barely one year after the introduction of the G1, but they did and boy was I excited to finally get my hands on the G2!

Features

A few of the improvements over the G1 are:

1. 3 selectable focus areas;
2. higher pixel count (4 megapixels);
3. better manual focus control;
4. better power saving features;
5. up to 120 seconds movies recording;
6. better metering; and
7. allows color adjustment in camera.

The 3 selectable focus areas function is a great feature in any camera. Any photographer will agree that most times, we tend to compose our shots with the subject off-center. It is a real hassle to lock the focus with the subject in the center and then recompose to get the right composition.

With the selectable areas, all you need to do is to tell the camera where your focus is and you can snap away! The autofocus mechanism of the G2 is excellent. The focus is fast and accurate most of the time. I hardly experience any "hunting" for focus.

It uses the same lens as the G1, a very fast lens with a maximum aperture of f2. Few other cameras in this class have such an excellent lens.

Unfortunately, as with all cameras that have "extending" lenses, the startup time of the G2 is rather sluggish. This is because it takes time for the lens to be fully extended before the camera is ready to take pictures. The same problem exists in the G1.

The color effects available (sephia, black & white, vivid & neutral) may not be very important especially if you have Photoshop. I do not ever mess with the color in the camera. If there is any adjustment that need to be made, I'd rather do it with Photoshop which has way more flexibility and allows me to be in more control.

Only the G1 & G2 have an ISO rating of 50. This produces the cleanest digital photos I've ever seen. In addition to that the G2 has an automatic noise reduction feature which reduces to a large extend any artifact that may appear in long exposure shots (another common problem with all digital cameras). The night shots I took with the G2 are simply great. I would need to enlarge the photos several times before I can see any noise.

The G2 allows you to record movies at low resolution up to 120 seconds. That is easily the longest time available in any digital camera.

Canon attempted to address the complaints by G1 owners about the lack of a proper handgrip but failed miserably. They have incorporated this plastic bulge that they try to pass off as a handgrip but it is simply too insubstantial to be of much use. Furthermore, it should have been clad in rubber to provide the proper grip. I would prefer the original G1 design. At least it is less bulky.

Photo Quality

As with the G1, the photos produced by the G2 are superb. This is largely due to the high quality lens used. The color is vivid. The contrast and sharpness can be adjusted in-camera but even without any adjustment, the are great.

As stated earlier, the focusing system is very good and that together with the incredibly low noise, help to produce very sharp photos.

The lens has real iris which gives very good control over the depth of field.

Battery Life

Here, Canon shines once more. I must have taken at least 400 photos before the battery went flat! And that is with the LCD on most of the time. You can confidently take the camera to any function and rest assured that you will not run out of battery in the middle of your shoot.

Conclusions

The G2 has way too many features that I can't possibly cover in this short article. To me, it is the best prosumer digicam available at this time. That is not to say that it has ALL the best features. It may not have the best zoom capability, not the highest pixel count, not the best design BUT on the balance of the features/quality/price, it is simply unbeatable.