The biggest limitation of the camera, for me, is the ISO. I find that anything over 200 ISO in color is mostly unusable. 400 in BW is even pushing it. I also wish that the lens was a little wider with a 2.0 max. aperture, but in the end that wasn't an absolute deal breaker.
It's greatest strengths are in usability. The knobs and rear thumb-wheel make for relatively quick setting changes without too much menu digging. In its native state it suffers from the same slowish focus/lock/shoot sluggishness, BUT there are ways to speed things up.
In order to make my Canon G10 more Leica-like in speed, I set the Review to OFF so it doesn't show me the photo I just took right after I take it (that alone shaves off 2 seconds). I also set the focus manually to approximate distances (employing zone focusing / hyper-focus for the Leica-philes). Since the sensor is small it has a greater depth of field and if you get your subjects within a foot you'll be fine.
Another setting you should turn off is MF Safety. This keeps the camera from engaging auto focus to check your manual focus. I also set the shooting to multiple continuous frames so in low light I can take a sequence and improve my chances of a shot in focus.
I set all these parameters and save it under the Custom Funciton 1, so when I turn the knob into C1 I'll be in street-shooter mode (aka HCB mode - for the Magnum geeks).
I'll be posting more thoughts and samples as the weeks go on.
2 comments:
russ - search around for the cdhk (canon devloper hacker kit - or something similar) if available for your new cam you'll be able to get behind the scenes and tweak a bunch of settings by way of a sd card loaded (non permanent) firmware update.
looks like a sweet camera...
Nice, I just purchased one myself. it has taken the place of the m4p on the mtn bike trips and slowly working it's way into my daily shoots. Have a good turkey day.
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