travelling with a point and shoot – part 2: the trip

December 2008

Six weeks. One point and shoot. Could I do it? That certainly was the question I was asking myself as I was stepping onto my flight to Bangkok. Of course, other thoughts crossed my mind too, like “Did I forget something?” and ”Will that kilo of ham in my luggage go off before we get there?” Well, let’s find out if the G9 was up to the task.

Size

This is the main reason for choosing a point and shoot over a DSLR in the first place and I have to say, it’s a very welcome change. Bulky as it may be ( for a point and shoot ), it happens to be the smallest camera I’ve ever owned, and it was a pleasure to just throw it into a bag or just carry around with a wrist strap. It’s so nice not having to carry a dedicated camera bag.

Though it might look awkward in your gold lycra hotpants, it’s still quite compact and didn’t feel overly bulky to carry or use. It’s not light, but the weight combined with the solid build made it feel very secure in the hand. It’s also fantastic for candid shots since it’s size and the matte black body doesn’t draw any attention. When it wasn’t in use, the lens sits flush with the body and the whole thing became about the size of a large block of soap.

Battery

Battery life is important when you’re travelling. Unfortunately, not having owned other point and shoots, I can’t really say if the battery life was good or bad. I had always used my 5D bodies with battery grips which allowed me to use two batteries in each body, giving me about 1400 shots per charge. Having said that, for what I used it for, the G9 easily lasted a whole day on one charge and a spare battery is quite cheap and small.

Speed

I’m glad to say that I don’t think there was a shot I missed because the camera was too slow. From being off to being ready to shoot takes less than a second which, having used other peoples point and shoots, is quite nice. So, unless you need to zoom in, since it always defaults back to wide when you power it on, you shouldn’t worry about missing any shots if you keep it on auto/program or any of the priority modes. I never used the camera to fire off multiple exposures but at about one frame per second, I’m not sure there’s much use for it.

Screen

It felt solid enough that all I did was put on a screen protecter ( which is just a film of plastic ) over the screen and never had to worry about getting scratches or breaking the thing. Having only used 2.5″ screens on my 5D and a 2″ screen on my first digital camera ( Sony 717 ), the 3″ screen on the G9 was very refreshing. View-ability was good, even in sunlight, but I didn’t use it all that much to review shots since I’d download all the files to my 17″ MacBook Pro every night. I do believe the images seem a cooler temp on the G9 screen than on my Mac though.

Controls

Very well laid out controls made the G9 a joy to use. I don’t think I could ever use a camera without a control wheel on the back as it’s such a good method to quickly make changes ( like the iPod’s click wheel ). Exposure changes where easy and the menu was fairly intuitive. The built in neutral density filter was very welcome in sunny and contrasty Cambodia.

One thing I found a little redundant was the dedicated ISO wheel. While I would gladly welcome it on my 5D, I found it of limited use on the G9. The difference is that my 5D can take decent images from ISO 50-1600 whereas the G9 really only performs well at ISO 50-200. It even has Auto ISO mode and ISO compensation settings so most the time I never needed to change it myself.

Image

Ah, so, the big question. Having used the 5D with L lenses for 2 years, how does the image quality of this point and shoot compare? At ISO 50 – 100 and in the daytime, surprisingly good. There’s a huge amount of detail with good sharpness and colour in a well exposed shot. Pixel for pixel, the 5D wins, but for real usage ( such as on the web ) the G9 is quite outstanding. Though the 5D shoots in 3:2 aspect ratio and the G9 in 4:3, they are both effectively 12 megapixel cameras and on 6 x 4 and up to 8 x 12 prints, I found the quality of the G9 to be quite acceptable indeed.

Once you pump the ISO to 200 and up, however, the gap widens considerably. Colour information goes down as the level of noise comes up. Not being able to use the RAW mode at the time ( because it was too new and Apple didn’t support it ) didn’t help either. But I already knew this when I bought the camera and was prepared for it. I just didn’t shoot much at night. And in emergencies the built in flash did a decent job and lighting stuff 2 meters away. Not pretty, but it does the job.

Purple fringing is visible in high contrast areas but is minimal and isn’t really noticeable at 25%. If it does bother you, you can always turn the picture black and white like my photo above. I found the lens to be quite sharp from ƒ2.8-ƒ8 with slight distortion on the wide end.

Overall I’m very happy with the quality of the images that came out of this camera. I’m including a gallery in part 3 showing some of the pictures I took during my 6 weeks away. Most of them have been processed through Aperture while a few have just been resized. I don’t think an unprocessed image straight out of the camera is necessary for evaluation as it’s what you can do with the image that counts.

Video

Now here’s something I’ve been missing out on for a very long time. The video capabilities on the G9 are great and recording 640 x 480 at 30 frames per second captures quite a lot of detail. The exposure is good but you can’t zoom while recording which is a pity. Sound is typical of such a small device where motion capture is secondary to stills, which isn’t to say that it’s bad, just not fantastic. Another neat feature is a time lapse mode where it can record 1 frame every 1 or 2 seconds for up to 2 hours.

Here’s a short clip of some of my young cousins in Cambodia. It’s hosted at Vimeo and you can download the original AVI file from my Vimeo page.

http://www.vimeo.com/2453719

As you can see the G9 handles different lighting conditions fairly well and the sound is quite acceptable. Movement is captured at a decent rate and for web use, I would have no hesitation to use the video capabilities.

Overall

Very pleased. The G9 is portable, reliable, fast and makes nice images. It’s limitations were easy to live with and is overshadowed by the thing it does well: take pictures. I don’t regret for a moment not taking my DSLR. Sure, some of the pictures would have turned out better, but the fact that I could always take this camera with me probably resulted in me getting more pictures.

In part 3 I’ll have a gallery of some of the pictures I took during my 6 weeks in Cambodia and in part 4 I’ll talk about some of the things I’ll do differently next time I go on a trip. Stay tuned.

part 1 // part 2 // part 3 // part 4