Canon Inc. (CAJ)

[LisaMarie]

Canon's PowerShot G9
PRODUCT REVIEW April 14, 2008, 9:06PM EST

Canon's PowerShot G9 a Punch
The new PowerShot digital camera picks up where the G7 left off, but offers oodles of features usually only found on higher-end cameras
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The Good: Feature-rich; 12-megapixel image capture; giant 3-inch view screen
The Bad: Menu system may be too complicated for nonenthusiasts
The Bottom Line: A sturdy, compact camera with features more common to high-end digital SLRs

Canon (CAJ) introduced the PowerShot G9 late last year as a near-identical replacement to its G7 predecessor, albeit heeding customer feedback with a feature set that places it squarely in the category of compact replacements for high-end digital cameras.

With 23 shooting modes, the G9 is really meant for photo enthusiasts who prefer to manipulate images on a computer. Despite looking and feeling like a formidable camera, the G9 is perfect for everyday use by anyone who wants a simple point-and-shoot with enough resolution to produce poster-size prints. The G9, a compact 13 oz., captures 12 megapixels of detail with a six-times optical zoom lens.

At $500, it's pricier than many seemingly comparable cameras, but few have such a wide range of features. In fact, the G9 has so many features and functions that the instruction manual looks like a small paperback novel. You could literally spend an hour setting up a single shot. For instance, the "My Colors" feature lets you specify vivid, neutral, sepia, black and white, lighter skin, or darker skin. And within "vivid," you can choose vivid blue, vivid red, vivid green, or delve deeper for even more customization. Other shooting options include user-selected focus zones, manual exposure settings, flash exposure compensation, light metering, video recording, and a two-hour voice memo recorder.

RESPONSIVE OPTIONS
Not everyone will appreciate, or even use, many of these functions on a regular basis. But most will appreciate the G9's built-in sensors, which detect the tiny shakes in your hand while you're lining up a shot. Using these sensors, the camera shifts the lens elements in an attempt to keep those shakes from blurring the picture. Comparable cameras from Nikon (NINOF) and Sony (SNE) also offer this relatively new image-stabilization technology. It's a great addition, though not foolproof. About 75% of the time, the pictures I thought were taken in perfectly still situations came out blur-free. That's a bit above average from what I've seen with other cameras (though it also suggests I may drink too much coffee).

The G9 has a speedy, responsive processor that focuses quickly on objects. During a recent trip to Spain, many of the photos I took in Barcelona came out exactly as I remembered the locations. On that trip I also took shots with a higher-end Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. With the exception of some superb image-stabilized telephoto shots from the EOS, I couldn't see much difference in the G9's photos once I downloaded the images to a computer.

FORM AND FUNCTION
The camera is encased in a black-metal housing. The zoom lens on the front sits behind its own protective covering. The top of the camera has a shoe for an external flash, and the back is dominated by a 3-inch color LCD screen, up from 2.5 inch on the G7. This display offers a neat feature that senses low-light situations and automatically adjusts the contrast.

Above the screen is a regular viewfinder with an odd design flaw: Looking through it, you can see the barrel of the extended zoom lens. Nowadays, of course, many people simply look at the color screen and never use the viewfinder, if the camera has one at all. This visual distraction also doesn't affect the photo, so I suspect few users will be as bothered as I was.

Another nice addition is face-detection technology, an increasingly common feature. Without this technology, which tracks up to nine people in a shot, some parts of the photos are bound to be out of focus. But with it, the G9 automatically adjusts the exposure speed, focus, and flash for an optimal picture. Canon ups the ante by giving users the ability to designate a particular face to make sure that one remains in focus regardless—a feature that's so cool, and works so easily, it makes me wonder why nobody thought of it sooner.

One of Canon's responses to customer feedback was to add "RAW" format shooting. For those unfamiliar with it, pictures shot in RAW are not processed down into the more familiar JPEG format. Instead, the image data are captured directly from the camera's sensors and left unprocessed, creating the equivalent of digital negatives. The downside is that RAW photos take up a devilish amount of memory. But with RAW, you can tinker with picture elements such as white balance and color grading in an editing program.

DIGITAL NEGATIVE
While the G9 was a dream to use in the field, I struggled to get it to work with my computer. Neither of the SD memory cards I had used in the camera were recognized when I slipped them into my Dell (DELL) desktop computer or Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) laptop. And when I left the card in the camera and tried connecting it directly to the Dell via USB cable, I kept getting error messages on the PC saying the device wasn't recognized. Only after I installed Canon's software would the two computers recognize the camera, but they still couldn't read the memory cards directly (though my Panasonic TV, which has a memory card slot, pulled up the images without a hitch).

The PowerShot G9 may be more camera than you'll ever need, but it has so many functions that you won't be caught short if you'd like to try something more sophisticated. For a couple hundred dollars more than your standard point-and-shoot, the G9 gives you almost all the power of a digital SLR in your pocket.

Edwards is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau.