Best Digital Compact Camera: Canon Powershot G10, G11

The back panel is much like any modern compact camera, with a large LCD screen and several buttons for menu functions etc. There is a good, large multi-purpose control wheel which makes scrolling, selecting and controlling other camera functions very easy. It is far easier to use these controls than with most cheaper cameras where most functions are buried deep in several layers of menus. Manual controls, including manual focus are very easy to access.

The Canon is very well made with chunky controls and good solid metal case. It is larger than almost any other compact camera, but the lens still retracts entirely into the body, so it can be put in a large pocket or handbag.

One unusual feature these days is it also has a proper optical view-finder.

Canon 5x Zoom Lens 6.1mm to 30.5mm (35mm equivalent of 28 to 140mm) aperture of f2.8 to f4.5

This is a very good quality lens for its size, better than most of the competition, although not as good as many lenses that could be attached to an SLR camera. There is some very slight chromatic aberration in some situations, but the pictures are generally sharp and in focus.

The Canon G10 has 14.7 Mega pixels and a fairly small CCD sensor (although fairly large by compact standards: 1/1.7"), so this is not perfect, but has an old style metal case with very tough, heavy construction and all the control a professional could need (it even outputs RAW files - essential for post-processing the photos). It sufferes a little from noise problems like so many compacts, but less so than most. It also has a good wide-angle lens (28mm)

The Canon Powershot G11 specifications are the same, except where specified:

Now for some photographs...

I regularly now use three different cameras: A Nikon F4s with slide film (A classic professional camera favoured by the Paparazzi and Sports photographers); a Nikon D80 (a good quality mid-range 10 Mega Pixel DSLR costing more than the Canon G10) and The Canon Powershot G10.

So which one is the best?

That's a difficult question; The D80 is more flexible with interchangeable and much bigger higher quality pixels whereas the G10 has more pixels, giving higher resolution (and potentially more noise) and is much smaller and portable. The F4 is a different kind of beast and to do an exact comparison would take ages for the film to be developed, then scanned (arguably this should win the contest but with far more effort), so I shall do the comparison between the two digital cameras and compare with a similar picture I took on the F4S a while ago, from the same spot.

I shall use the view out of my lounge window as a simple test (Richmond Hill, West London, England, if you're interested)

The picture above is taken with the Canon, unprocessed, straight from the camera, then below I have cropped pictures from the Nikon D80 and the Canon PowerShot G10. Notice the extra resolution of the Canon in the cropped images.

Conclusion

In this very superficial test the Canon PowerShot G10 appears sharper than the Nikon D80, in this case, but this was an easy test. In darker conditions where noise may be a problem or shooting animals on safari I would expect the Nikon D80 to win and with the Nikon there is at least the option of different expensive interchangeable lenses (Pictures to be added once I have done the tests) but the point of this exercise is to show that a good compact camera can give very good results, comparable with a good SLR when the conditions are right.

The Nikon F4S film camera, using Fuji slide film scanned at 4000dpi with a Canon FS4000US film scanner gave the most detail, but clearly visible grain/noise in the cropped images, making the resulting picture harder to post-process.