Canon Power Shot G1 Digital Camera

Note: This article should fit on a 1024 x 768 screen.
The size is to best accommodate the accompanying photos.
I apologize for making those using smaller resolutions scroll.

Canon Power Shot G1 Digital Camera — A Second OpinionBy William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Last month TPCUG member Wade Herman wrote about his new Canon G1 digital camera. He had a lot of nice things to say and only a few small items that he wished Canon had included but didn’t. The main thing he would have liked would be more zoom in the zoom lens. The G1 has an optical 3 power zoom.

Now that we have a G1 in our family, I, too, would like a larger zoom ratio. I would also like to be able to focus closer in macro mode for better close up photography—but perhaps we are asking too much of one lens and should be happy with the quite good quality of photos produced by this camera.

I can thank my wife for the camera, since after reading Wade’s article she suggested that instead of separate gifts we get the G1 for both of us. I certainly couldn’t turn down an offer like that. Wade brought his camera over, and I tried out about 20 shots with it, he downloaded them to his computer and sent them to me via email (for which a cable modem is handy). Using a setting of medium resolution and medium quality compression, the images were quite good. So then it was only a matter of how to get the camera before Christmas.

Horse at Three D Farm, Riverview, Florida

With less than a week to go, since Amazon is supposed to give us 5% on orders through the TPCUG web site, I checked Amazon and they had the camera for $900 (a bit less than when Wade bought his from a camera store), shipping in 2 to 3 days. Since the camera comes with only a 16 MB compact flash memory card, we also ordered a 48 MB memory card at the good price of $93. Then the wait began. The flash memory came in two days, but the Amazon site kept saying the camera was in stock and usually ships in 2 – 3 days. It finally did ship and arrived the Friday before Christmas. The only let down was that Amazon restricts its "commissions" on orders to a maximum of $10 except on books. So the TPCUG got $10 for the camera instead of the expected $45.

Of course, the camera couldn’t be opened until Christmas. Since then we have taken over 160 photos in five days. As Wade pointed out, one advantage of a digital camera is that you can simply delete the photos that you don’t like. At present I have deleted 70 of the 160 and will undoubtedly delete many more.


Holiday lights on S Boulevard, Tampa, Florida	This bunny may look like he needs a little red eye reduction, but that is his natural eye color

Now a word about the photos accompanying this article. The horse and holiday lights were taken at an image resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels and saved as JPEG files with what Canon calls fine compression (In descending order there is RAW, i.e., no compression, superfine, fine and normal compression). The rabbit was taken at a resolution of 1024 x 768 and saved with fine compression. The panorama was taken at 2048 x 1563 resolution and saved with super fine compression. All except the holiday lights were taken in the auto mode, with the horse photo using the built in flash.

The holiday lights were taken in manual mode with an ISO setting of 100 (think film speed), a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds and an aperture of 3.5. All of this information and more being available to you when you view a photo in the Canon supplied ZoomBrowser EX. This camera is particularly handy for available light photos, since you can immediately see your potential shot in the LCD display and adjust the exposure time until you get the results you want. And then if you do take several shots at different exposures, you can discard the unwanted shots. I found an exposure time of from one second to 2.5 seconds with the ISO setting of 100 provided the exposure I wanted. Of course, a tripod was used for the nighttime shots.

I am particularly intrigued by the camera’s ability when coupled with the supplied PhotoStitch software to make quite good panoramic photographs. If you carefully overlap your separate shots about 30%, then the PhotoStitch program does a fairly good job of automatically merging them into the panorama. However, for the best results you should use the manual align mode of the program, which is the method I employed for the backyard panorama. I used a tripod to do this panoramic shot. That is the reason for the uneven top and bottom borders—what should be a curved image is being projected onto a flat page. I could have cropped the final image, but I prefer to show more of the combined images.

In addition to the PhotoStitch software for making panoramic photos and the ZoomBrowser software that allows you to view the photos while they are in the camera, download them to computer, then organize and view them in the computer, Adobe PhotoShop LE is also supplied. Since I already have PhotoShop I didn’t install this and can’t detail the capabilities of the program.

backyard panarama_t.jpg (41141 bytes)

The photos accompanying this article were brought into PhotoShop and reduced to a 1024 x 768 pixel size, then they were saved as JPEG images at what Adobe calls a level 3 (medium) quality file on a scale of 0 – 10. When I publish the HTML version of this newsletter at the TPCUG web site I will probably reduce the files even further to facilitate downloading. As an example of compression, the holiday lights 2048 x 1536 JPEG image as saved by the camera was 1,334 KB, which PhotoShop claims is equivalent to a 9 MB uncompressed file. But after reducing it to 1024 x 768 and saving it with level 3 compression, the resulting JPEG is only 162 KB This is possibly still a bit large for an image on an Internet page, and I will probably reduce it further for the HTML version of the article.[This was done, e.g., the "lights" photo went from an original camera JPEG file of 1,334 KB (9 MB as a non compressed file according to PhotoShop) to a 49 KB JPEG for what you see on this web page--quite a reduction]

And that brings me to suggest that you go to http://www.tpcug.org and check out this article in the HTML version of the newsletter to be posted there. That way you will be able to better judge the camera's capabilities by viewing the photos in color.

For an excellent review of the camera with probably more detail than you can absorb, go to the site http://www.dpreview.com/. It is an excellent source of information on digital imaging. u