Although Canon announced the Powershot G16 internationally some time in August, its South African office today gave us a peek at this high-end point and shoot.
Technically, the G16 could be termed a bridge camera, since its professional feature set and relatively compact design perfectly bridges the gap between pocket cameras and SLRs. It might only have a 12-megapixel sensor, but Canon’s long since left other manufacturers to continue with the megapixel race. Instead, it’s focussing on image sensors with larger physical photosites (pixels, for all intents and purposes), which makes them more sensitive to light and leads to less noise in images – something it calls its HS (high sensitivity) system.
It shows, too. From the brief hands-on with the G16, it performed brilliantly in average indoor lighting, and sample shots didn’t exhibit any noticeable noise. Crank it to its maximum ISO of 12 800 and you’ll notice it, but it shouldn’t be necessary thanks to a lens that operates between apertures of f/1.8 and f/2.8. Most other pocket cameras might have a fast f/2 lens, but when zoomed in all the way they’re usually stuck at f/5.6 or more. That the G16 can still have a very fast f/2.8 aperture when its 4x optical zoom is maxed out, is very impressive. And if you do have to shoot at high ISO, you can do so in RAW format, so at least some good post-processing software will take care of the noise.
Then again, that’s sort of what professionals would expect from the G-series. According to Canon’s research more than half of G-series owners use their cameras for professional work, so the company has worked hard to give this pocket wonder a suitable feature set.
It’s not just the lens that’s fast. Canon’s reworked the autofocus system to be 40% faster, which will be very useful in burst mode. Speaking of, the G16 can run through an entire memory card while shooting full-resolution stills at 9.3 frames per second. You’d have to spend serious money to get even a professional SLR that can do that. The only caveat is that you’ll need a high-speed SD card that’s classified UHS1. And those don’t come cheap. Another benefit of having that much bandwidth from the memory card, and the new DIGIC 6 image processor, is the possibility to shoot 1080P video at 60 frames per second.
If autofocus ain’t your thang, the new manual focus definitely will be. It’s the first G-series camera to feature focus peaking. Pop it into manual mode, then adjust focus with the buttons or dial on the rear of the camera. When something is in focus it’ll peak using a bright colour: blue, red, or yellow. That makes it easy to use the rear viewfinder for tricky macro shots, and making sure you have exact control over what you want to focus on.
With only a limited amount of hands-on time the G16 definitely has our attention. Current estimates for a retail price put it at around R5 999, which is a lot of camera for the money. It might not be as versatile as an EOS SLR, but it’s also a lot cheaper when all things are considered. Expect a full review when it goes on sale around October 2013.
