Should the Sony RX100 be worried?
The Canon Powershot G7 X is a compact camera, but one that’s out to impress people who can tell good pictures from bad ones at fifty paces. It has a much larger sensor and much sharper lens than the average compact, offering much greater low-light flexibility and creative control than most.
It’s one of the most convincing alternatives to the fantastic Sony RX100 III we’ve seen. But is the £579.99 Canon Powershot G7 X really as good?
We’ll be working on the full review soon, but we got an early look at the camera to see what it’s all about.
Canon Powershot G7 X: Design
The aim of the Canon Powershot G7 X is to fit some moderately serious camera hardware into the body of a normal compact. The big deal here is that it uses a 1-inch sensor, rather than the 1/2.3-inch sensors still used in many compacts.
Size-wise, the Canon Powershot G7 X is on the money. It’s just a shade larger than the lower-end compact Powershot cameras in the range. To earn its place it needs to be a good deal smaller than Panasonic and Olympus's Micro Four-Thirds compact system cameras, and it is. By quite a margin.
You could even call it pocketable. As long as your trousers aren’t too skinny. It is also, predictably, quite similar in design to the Sony RX100 series, which has proved massively popular since its inception in 2012.
Canon Powershot G7 X: Features
It ticks the convenience box pretty successfully, and the Canon Powershot G7 X’s features list is compelling too. The sensor is a 20-megapixel 1-inch number, with sensitivity that goes all the way up to ISO 12,800.
This will give you masses more low-light flexibility than other compacts, making it perfect for gigs, and late night social occasions where you don’t want to be singled out as the photo-obsessed tech nerd just for taking a few pics with a DSLR.
The Canon Powershot G7 X screen provides a nice bit of casual-friendly design too. The display tilts, either to 90 degrees for easy angled shooting, to flipping the full 180 for the classic selfie angle.
It’s not a fully articulated screen, but the one-directional tilt used here seems to be becoming increasingly popular – not least because it can be implemented without adding much bulk.
The Canon Powershot G7 X also offers NFC and Wi-Fi, making transferring photos to a phone or tablet pretty easy. They’re standard features, but in concert with the design tweaks it’s clear this is a camera that cares about being convenient as much as it cares about image quality.
Canon Powershot G7 X:Lens and Image Quality
But back to the good stuff: the lens. The Canon Powershot G7 X has a fairly wide zoom range for a compact with a large sensor, offering an equivalent zoom of 24-100mm. That’s a lot greater than the 24-70mm you get with the Sony RX100 III, and will probably be one of this model’s top boasting points.
I find its maximum aperture skills more exciting, though. It ranges from f/1.8 to 2.8 across the zoom, giving you real scope for some creative use of shallow depth of field in aperture priority mode. This is something we’ll test at review but – fingers crossed – lovely blurry backgrounds should await. You’ll get better effects here than with the kit lenses of system cameras too, justifying some of the hefty £580 cost.
The maximum aperture of the Canon Powershot G7 X doesn’t skip down to f/2.8 as soon as you touch the zoom either. From f/1.8 shooting wide, it drops to f/2.2 at 35mm, f/2.5 at around 50mm before dropping down to the final f/2.8 at 85mm. Even f/2.8 isn’t too bad to work with.
There are a few nice nods to the enthusiast crowd too. There’s an /-3EV exposure compensation dial on the top plate for quick adjustments, and it has the great clicky feel that can almost fool you into thinking you’re using an old-school camera, rather than one controlled by software instead of good old mechanical dials.
What all this adds up to is a camera that’s easy to use and much less of a practical burden than a larger DSLR or compact system camera. And one with the sort of image quality and some of the handling that the more avid camera fan is after. As a second camera to act as a back-up for a DSLR, it seems just about perfect.
There’s just one obvious issue: battery life is not great, as with many compacts. You’ll get around 210 shots off a charge, but the Canon Powershot G7 X does offer an eco mode that claims to offer around 310 shots. We’ll have a look at exactly what the trade-offs are at review.
Video skills of the Canon Powershot G7 X are decent, if not really remarkable. You can shoot at up to 1080p resolution at 60fps, and get manual exposure control when you select video shooting using the mode dial. Audio is recorded using the stereo mic up on the top plate.
First Impressions
The Canon Powershot G7 X offers one of the few obvious alternatives to the Sony RX100 III and its predecessors, which have ruled the land of large sensor compacts for the last couple of years. From a specs and design perspective, it certainly seems to do the right things.
A large sensor and fast lens is a good combo. Our question is whether it’ll really provide the sort of great low-light results we’ve seen from Sony’s RX100 cameras. The jury’s still out on that one, so be sure to check back soon for the full review.
Next, read our best digital cameras round-up