PowerShot G9: First impressions

As I mentioned late last week, I've acquired a Canon PowerShot G9.

Ever since I got my Canon EOS 400D, and started getting addicted to photography, I've been wanting a compact camera that I could take anywhere (sometimes a dSLR is just too bulky). I also wanted one that had a good range of control (full manual mode right through to an auto-everything "I don't want to have to think" mode), felt solid and, as daft as it sounds, looked good. The G9 seems to fit all of these (the fact that it does raw files too is a bonus).

I won't even bother trying to do anything close to a review, there are plenty of those about, some of them going into great detail. I did, however, want to note my first impressions of it.

I went for a walk around our village last Sunday and took only the G9. The results can be seen over here. I found that the camera handled pretty well. The screen was easy to use in all conditions (shade and direct sunlight), the camera itself felt right in my hands, the buttons and dials are a bit on the small side for my fingers but not impossible to use (and it probably wouldn't be that good a compact camera if it wasn't very compact, right?), program-auto mode seems to cope fairly well with most situations and manual mode is a joy to use (I don't think I'd ever really thought about just how useful a live histogram would be).

Being small it's also very easy to keep to hand and the time from pressing the power button to being in a position to take a shot (assuming I've left it in program-auto) is short enough that it wouldn't be an issue in most cases.

Simply put: so far I'm very happy with it. I feel that it pretty much perfectly fits the requirement I had. It'll be nice to be able to take a camera almost everywhere with me now.