The 10 Most Important Canon PowerShot Cameras of All-Time

I had a G12, G16, the latter a very good implementation of the Sony sensor, but never really fell head over heels in love with it. However, the next one, the G1X was very good indeed, a camera that I felt I could take anywhere without later regret that I should have made the effort to carry FF dslr. Reviewers laughed at the optical finder, but it was actually perfectly adequate most of the time. I gave it away to a friend of mine after getting the G1Xiii, but still have an uncomfortable feeling that it was better in some ways.
The G1X was a little clunky; the mark iii did away with that and is quite a polished product. Again I can use it without having remorse later, the IQ is excellent and the lens is pretty good. Mine certainly isn’t ‘soft’ as some reviewers claimed. It’s going with me to Glencoe in a couple of weeks.
 
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I startet my digital camera journey with the G2 - the minor attractive silver variant. It was expensive and meant for some web photos or shots in library to replace paper copies during writing a book.
This camera made a lot of fun because it had really good film like quality - no strange artifacts etc. And the lens was bright enough for lower light conditions, some bokeh and equipped with some close up capability.
Flippy screen was very helpful for alternative angles of view and the stamp like size of it helped to educate to look at the scene to understand what is on the display - the display was good enough for final composition.
Tech wise and for learning how to shoot digitally it was and is a master piece I still own.
S95 was the 2nd and last P&S from Canon, a good companion but I would prefer an M50 ii with e.g. EF-M 32 in 99.999% of use cases.
 
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I landed a very nice Pro1 on eBay last year. I was curious to see how it compared to the Minolta Dimage A2 that I have had since it was first released. I believe both cameras have the same CCD sensor and the lenses are very similar. The Minolta is 7.2-50.8 f/2.8-3.5 and the Canon is 7.2-50.8 f/2.4-3.5. The Pro1 is a substantially smaller camera than the Minolta, but looking at images, they are very close. Both lenses are excellent over the entire zoom range and both offer RAW files. I took many longtime favorite images with the Minolta, but the 5D II turned me into a Canonista, so I was curious about the comparison. Below are a couple of samples. The first is from the Minolta (shot many years ago) and the second from the Canon. Both are processed similarly in LR (no Topaz applied) with NR (not really needed in either case), and little boost in sharpening. My take is they are very close, albeit they have somewhat different operating paradigms. It was a fun experiment and I will keep both cameras. I have found the A2 images to work very well blown up by 2x in gigapixel. I believe the same would be true of the Pro1 images.



PICT0001.jpg

CRW_0035.jpg
 
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The Canon Powershot Pro 1 sounds really interesting- I´d love a compact camera with a L lens. I don´t believe Canon will release another camera like this one, but I´d like them to.

Edit: The Pro 1 looks similar in size to the R8 actually. It is smaller but I don´t if there is a huge difference.
 
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Another excellent article, thank you, Craig.

I used the Pro 1, PRO90, TX1 and SX1, and still have all but the SX1 (I now use a G3X). I think the Pro1 was my favourite - and who doesn't love an 'L-Series' lens on a compact! The TX1 exuded quality, but I know that some users really struggled with its ergonomics. Personally, I really enjoyed using it - an astonishing lens reach for the time, all packed into such a small body. The power-zoom ring of the Pro90 was a pleasure to use.

Again, with the exception of the SX1, I seem to have been great at purchasing one-off designs from Canon - I would have loved a second generation of any of those previous cameras, or the G3X. I hope that a 24-240+mm photo-centric version of the V1 lies just around the corner - my G3X is on its last legs!

©2009 dominicprice.com - French Sunset.jpgFrench Sunset (04-10-2009) - Canon PowerShot SX1 IS - 1/500s | f/4 | ISO-80 | 15mm
Quite a challenge for the camera to handle this contre-jour shot, and of course, there is longitudinal chromatic aberration on the children, but there's so much else going on with the sunset colours that it doesn't detract too much. To this day, I use this image as the wallpaper on my iPhone.
 
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