Living With Canon's PowerShot G3 X

Picking a camera always involves trade-offs. Smartphone cameras are incredibly convenient, because you always have them available and because they have become surprisingly good for their size. But these cameras don't capture the level of detail you might like, especially in low-light, and of course they lack features such as optical zoom. DSLRs take the best pictures, but they tend to be large and expensive, especially if you factor in the lens you will need to buy, and they can be inconvenient to carry. Mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras are a bit smaller and lighter, but can still be complex and inconvenient. Many compact cameras are easier to carry than interchangeable lens cameras and often offer optical zoom and a few other nice features, but most use relatively small image sensors - typically 1/2.3-in. (6.17 by 4.55mm) sensors – so the quality of the pictures leaves something to be desired, and most don't do a great job of capturing motion.

In between, we've recently seen the introduction of several cameras with 1-inch (13.2 by 8.8mm) sensors. They aren't as big as the sensors on DSLRs, but the quality of the images can be quite good, certainly surpassing the typical compact camera and going well beyond your normal smartphone. A few months ago, I tried out a Sony RX 100 Mark IV and loved the quality of the pictures it took. But it had only a 2.9x optical zoom, which is good in a lot of places, but doesn't really help me when I want to take photos at events where the speaker or performer is on a stage far away. For these occasions, I've been using the Canon SX700 series, which offers a 30x optical zoom. I find that it gives me good, but not great pictures, and that it's particularly hard to get good shots of people in motion or in low light.

Into this market comes the Canon PowerShot G3 X, which offers a 1-inch sensor and a 25x 24-600mm (35mm equivalent) zoom lens. I've been trying it out over the past few weeks, and found a lot to like, but also a number of trade-offs.

The G3 X is relatively large, at 4.2 inches deep and weighing 1.6 pounds, in part because of the size of the lens. The larger the sensor, the larger the required lens to get optical zoom, and it does feel extremely solid in your hand, more like a DSLR than a compact camera. Its basic controls will be familiar to most users of smaller Canon cameras, but it adds a number of buttons and rings to give you more control, such as a dedicated ring for adjusting exposure, and a ring on the lens for manual focus. For instance, you can use the normal zoom dial for continuous zoom or another dial for step zoom. In general, I found it pretty intuitive – in auto mode, it functions very simply, and you have many more modes for manual shooting.

I found a lot of the little touches on the camera to be quite nice. It has a 3.2-inch articulating touch screen that pops out, so it is good for taking pictures while holding the camera above your head, for taking selfies, or just for positioning the screen so you can see it better on a sunny day. A little button on the side of the lens will temporarily bring the zoom back in, so you can see how your shot is framed within the overall scene. This makes it easier to track moving subjects. Wi-Fi, which connects the camera to the Canon Connect app on either an iPhone or Android, worked quite well, and also includes NFC. The G3 X has a small built-in flash, but no electronic viewfinder, though it does have a hot shoe for an optional viewfinder or an external flash.

In trying it out, I found the combination of the zoom lens and the larger sensor let me capture some photos I probably wouldn't have gotten with most other cameras, such as this one I captured at a Billy Joel concert.

It's not always easy to keep the picture steady at the longest zoom, but in general I was impressed by the quality of the shots at such a long range zoom. There have been some complaints that at 600mm, the lens steps down to f/5.6, so it captures less light, but in general, I was quite happy with that. Overall, I found the G3 X did a terrific job with image quality in landscapes as well as portrait photography.

For instance, here is a picture of St. Bart's Church in New York at the widest setting.

And here is a detail of the roof.

In other cases, I did notice some limitations. At the default mode it can take 6.4 frames per second of JPEG images with fine compression, though when capturing RAW images with the best compression setting, it goes down to 0.8 frames per second. For capturing motion, I thought it was ok, but clearly not as good as a current DSLR. It also didn't seem quite as fast to focus as I would have liked it to be – not bad, but not great.

The G3 X can take 1080p video at 60 frames per second in MP4 format, and I was able to get good videos in many cases, though sometimes I found the video went out of focus, particularly in longer zoom shots.

The biggest trade-off, though, comes with the size. It's not as big as a DSLR or a mirrorless camera with a similar zoom lens – and a lot lighter than carrying multiple lenses – but it's considerably too big to be pocketable. And with a $999 list price, it's relatively expensive, so many people might be better off carrying a smaller compact camera in most situations and a more versatile DSLR when you really want the best shot. The Sony RX100 IV I tested also took great photos, but had a much smaller zoom, so it was easier to carry.

Still, if you want a simple camera with a very good sensor and a long zoom lens, the G3 X is an interesting choice. It's not pocketable, but it is lighter than an equivalent DSLR setup, and I found the pictures to be quite good, especially in the situations where you can't get as close as you'd like to be.

For more, see PCMag's full review.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.

Source: Living With Canon's PowerShot G3 X