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Entry 101, on 2004-12-12 at 16:15:37 (Rating 1, Science)

A few days ago I bought a new expensive toy. Its a Canon PowerShot G6 digital camera. This is my third digital camera - previously I had a Nikon CoolPix 885, and a Sony Cybershot DSC-P92.

The Canon is a lovely piece of electronics - its a bit bigger than my previous cameras but its very flexible, it has a brilliant user interface, and it produces beautiful quality pictures. I have used it for photos from basic landscape scenes in full sunlight, to astro-photos of the stars, to macro photos of small objects.

The G6 has a 7.1 megapixel CCD and a high quality, fast (f/2) 4x zoom lens. I have a 512 MB flash card which can store 160 super high quality photos, or - believe it or not - almost 6,000 small, lower quality pictures. It also takes good quality video, which looks just as good as the output of most video cameras, although it can only record it in 3 minute bursts.

Canon have done an excellent job of the controls on this camera, especially considering how many functions and options are available. The dials and controls are all in just the right place, and less used stuff is accessed through a menu system, similar to other cameras. A major advantage to me is that the general layout of the controls is similar to my Canon EOS-5 film camera.

An area many other cameras fail on is the ability to use full and partial manual controls in situations where the fully automatic system might not be appropriate. Accessing manual shutter speed, aperture, focus, white balance, and sensitivity is very easy and works really well. I have already used the exposure and focus lock options in tricky situations.

If you are reading this blog from my web site you will see a sample photo taken with the G6 on this page. Of course you are only seeing 105,000 out of the 7 million pixels of the original but its not practical to access 4 MB images on the web.

Comment 1 (16) by Anonymous on 2005-02-21 at 14:27:00: Sounds like a nice camera.

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