More on the Canon G9

Some observations from my first month of shooting with the G9...

One, I've been wholly won over by the G9's RAW mode. The additional storage required for the images is a small price to pay for the tremendous flexibility you gain when it comes time to edit/develop. More than anything, I love the ability to swing the white balance in whatever direction I choose. With a JPEG, you can play around a little, but with RAW, there's really no limit. (A healthy portion of my admiration for RAW is probably due to my introduction to Adobe Lightroom, but that's another story.)

Two, I really wish that the G9's zoom was biased a little more towards the wide end. Back in my F3HP days, my Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 was far and away my favourite lens. With its tremendous depth of field, excellent sharpness, and extended spatial perspective, it produced gorgeous images and helped to turn the mundane into something a little special. The bottom end of the G9's zoom, however, is pedestrian, at best. There's simply no way to make the foreground loom when you're working with a 35mm (effective) perspective. If the engineers at Canon are reading this (fat chance!), the one thing I'd love to see in the G10's specification is a 28mm (or wider) starting point for the zoom. The average consumer seems more impressed by the telephoto end of things, sadly, but I would gladly step down to 180mm (or even 135mm) at the far end, if I could start off at 24mm.

Three, a larger sensor would be nice. Not so much for more mega pixels, less noise, etc., but mostly for reasons of depth of field. As things stand right now with the G9's 1/1.7" sensor, a 210mm focal length (35mm equivalent) is achieved at just 44.4mm. This certainly makes for a physically compact camera but it also means that while you've got the magnification of a 210mm lens, you've got the depth of field of a 45mm lens. It's really tough to blur the background, even wide open, when you're shooting with a 45 mm lens. I understand that the idea of full-frame sensors in compact cameras constitutes something of an oxymoron, but even a little improvement in this area would translate into less depth of field which, at the telephoto end, anyway, would be very much appreciated, indeed.

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