The Canon G10 is a wonderful, powerful point and shoot camera with full manual control. It combines a great mix of attributes that add up to a fantastic camera to carry everywhere. I have been toting it all over Manhattan and have shot hundreds of pictures now. Having the creative control to set aperture and shutter speed allows one to fine tune exposure in a way that has not really been possible with point and shoots. The fact that it shoots large raw files is an added bonus. I am a little put out with Adobe for not including G10 support in a version of camera raw that works with CS3. Grrrrr. It is really nice to be able to work a raw file and have the same flexibility that I do with the files from my D200. The battery seems to have been conjured up by the enegizer bunny, it just keeps going and going. It literally will go for hundreds of shots between charges. The control layout also works very well. The exposure compensation dial on the left side is so easy to manipulate when you are shooting in either full auto, aperture priority, or shutter priority. ISO and shooting mode on the right are also easy to access. The controls all feel very solid and provide positive feedback as they are manipulated. The camera fits nicely in a coat pocket and I recommend the Kata DP 415 belt pouch as an alternative. This camera is perfect for a photographer looking for creative control and best in class image quality. The only people I would advise to steer away from this model are those for whom size is a much bigger priority than image quality. If you are just a casual shooter looking for a snap shooter there are probably better alternatives.

Calling all control freaks. If you are used to having control over your photographic experience but are tired of lugging your heavy, clunky DSLR with you or, worse yet, not having a camera with you at all times, then this is a great alternative. Let's be clear about one thing...THIS IS NOT A DSLR! But this is the best alternative that will fit in your pocket. (jacket, not pants) Don't miss anymore shots! This is a great little camera.

The G10 gets trashed in reviews by people who expect it to take its nearly 15 megapixels on a tiny sensor and give results akin to a full-frame DSLR. Well, that's just plain dumb. If that's what you expect, think again. If you want the highest possible image quality even at high ISOs, you should save up the $$$$ for that DSLR. Or, better yet, learn photographic technique and processes and buy an 8x10 view camera with a heavy tripod and get the best in image quality.

The G10 is what it is. It is a well-built, versatile, small camera that is highly capable in highly capable hands and still very functional to those less capable. It's a camera for the person who uses bigger cameras who doesn't always want or need to carry a bigger camera. It produces satisfying results and it has a super good lens that covers the most useful focal length range (35mm equivalent 28mm to 135mm--I know, it says it goes to 140mm but 135mm is a traditional focal length and 5mm +/- doesn't matter at all when you get into the telephoto range).

My background includes three plus decades in photography as a former professional to present enthusiast. Taking up digital photography some time back, I discovered there's not much difference in the practice compared to using film. Many people try to complicate things, but photography is still pretty basic. You don't have to be a deep thinker, you just have to see things. I like equipment that doesn't get in the way of seeing. I've been using the G10 for the past week and I'm impressed with the results I've gotten. I also like the way it handles. For a number of years, I have used Canon EOS film cameras and more recently DSLRs. The ergonomics and functions of the G10 seem fairly familiar to me. I've also used Leica rangefinders when I wanted something smaller and quieter for candid photography on trips or when attending events. The G10 fits nicely into this niche and for a heckuva lot less than a Leica M8 digital.

I've shot 35mm Tri-X and HP5+ film pushed to high ISOs in order to accomplish pictures under low light without using flash. I'm familiar with grain. It's not my enemy. It's not a bad thing. It just "is". So when people complain of noise at high ISOs with the G10, I have to respond, "So what?" The important thing is not that there is grain or noise in the picture, it's whether or not the picture you took was worth taking. Image quality is secondary under those circumstances. The G10 pictures are perfectly fine under these circumstances.

But if you have to ask about image quality at the lower ISOs, the G10 does a great job. JPEGs straight from the camera are excellent. There are two custom functions that can be set to your preferences. I have one set for black and white and one set for super vivid color. I also have been shooting in RAW and I've gotten good results here as well. I'm still playing with RAW conversions from this camera. The conversion process seems a little more cumbersome than how it is done with my Canon DSLR's software. I'm still in the learning process in the regard. I'm probably complicating a process that is really not that complicated.

Who would benefit from using this camera? Just about anyone from the vacation/family/holiday chronicler of events to the seasoned professional looking for a "pro"-grade point and shoot (a contradiction in terms, I agree). It produces great results shooting in bright light at low ISOs and the results under low light at higher ISOs is only a cause for concern if your expectations are too high.

this is a great camera.

I used to shoot with a Canon 5D that has exceptional image quality but being too bulky with lenses I rarely took it in trips.

the Canon G10 on the other hand is very easy to pack and carry around and the image quality is very good also . has so many features , it takes time to learn how to really use them all.

I highly recommend it to people who care about good quality photo equipment !

it is an excellent tool in the hand of creative photographers.

The G10 is an amazing camera. I bought it two weeks ago based on Michael Reichman's (luminouslandscape website) and Thom Hogan's (bythom[...]) reviews. I am an advanced amateur/prosumer -- I sell fine art landscapes, and have been photographing for about 35 years.

The G10 is heavy at about a pound, but I like the heft. It is quite compact (at least from my perspective) -- the lens fully retracts and it will fit in a large jacket pocket. I have a medium-large Zing pouch I put it in and carry in my backpack, or alternatively put the Zing pouch on my belt loop.

I'm astonished at the image quality and functionality offered by the G10. I haven't shot any jpegs, only RAW (using DPP to process RAW; the RAW images will no doubt be more malleable with other software when they support the G10 -- DPP is fairly limited). In RAW, at ISO 80 on a tripod, I think the detail rendered by the G10 exceeds or at least equals the Canon 5D. It may have a weaker or virtually no AA filter.

The lens on the G10 is fantastic. There is very little resolution fall off, even wide open, edge to edge and into the corners.

In my mind, the closest equivalent to the G10 is a Fuji 645 medium format rangefinder (remember the small zoom range Fuji 645 compact?), but the G10 is better in almost every way. The G10 is far lighter and more compact, offers a great zoom range (and is sharp throughout the zoom range) and image stabilization, and has enough resolution to produce fine art quality prints, up to 18" or 24" in the long dimension without stitching.

I think the G10 is opening up a whole new world of landscape, street photography possibilities, and what about the incredible macro versatility?

There is a substantial drop off in image quality from ISO 200 to ISO 400 on the G10, but ISO 400 is still very very good (again shooting RAW), much better than the panasonic LX3 that I tried for a week or two at ISO 400.

I must be crazy. I can't believe a compact with such a small sensor can render detail this well. I'm seeing the G10 as a whole new tool that will open up different possibilities and different ways of seeing (and have different limitations than a Canon DSLR). I haven't been this excited about a photographic tool since I purchased my Canon 5D over 3 years ago.

The Canon G10 offers "automatic" settings that I haven't tried. For an advanced photographer it offers a wealth of manual controls and customization, which I'm still learning. One very nice touch is that the custom settings on the top dial (there are two) allow you to save the zoom settings and manual focus setting -- so I have one saved at a 35mm focal length equivalent and another at a 50mm equivalent. This allows quick, street shooting, similar to what one can do with a Leica rangefinder, though the G10 has a much different look given the virtually infinite depth of field due to the small sensor.

I bought this camera, waited, got ticked off at the price drop then it arrived. Charged the battery (doesn;t that suck with electronics, you get the thing and then wait till the battery charges 8 hours) I get it, plug it in and turn it on. And let me say, I was laying on my stomach on a bed with the camera facing down. When the camera turned on it was about 2 inches from this throw blanket thing. On the screen I could count every thread with no blur. I said out loud. "Wow.....that;s ****'in ridiculous"

I think went on to use the camera in the last 2 days. I've taken outdoor shots, art gallery photo's, night shots etc. The best thing is, in galleries, flash camera's are not allowed. This thing sucks light from some cosmo's unknown, leaving me with perfect shots and leaving them thinking....You jerk.

The camera starts up in less than a second, it's not big and bulky at all. It cannot fit in your pocket, so don't buy this camera if it's just for you and your friends to post pictures on myspace. (p.s. your lame) buy this camera if you want photo's that capture every imagine perfectly. Has a screen that makes me want to watch movies on (it's a 3" LCD that is simply amazing). I'm taking this to Rome soon. And I know that it will capture the best pictures possible. And then a little gypsie will steal it. And I'll be sad. But when I rebuy another, this will be the one I buy.

We received this camera recently and love it. It takes excellent photo's. I really like the menu and navigation setup on the camera,we actually prefer the size of the camera as comapared to the ultra compacts. It's well built and made in Japan not China. Auto settings work well,as well as SCN settings or if you have the knowledge the manual controls allow you to take further control. Pictures can be a little noisy at high ISO's and and photoshop won't work with RAW FILES but overall we love this camera.

My title sounds like I'm damning this camera with faint praise, but it's actually seriously intended. By "its type," I mean a high-quality, traditional rangefinder-type configuration (specifically including a viewfinder) with advanced amateur or better controls, RAW capability, hot shoe, and a decent lens.

In the digital world, with current technology - no matter how much you spend - that involves compromises. Do I wish that Canon had opted for a sensor with fewer megapixels? Yes. Would I like a better viewfinder? Yes. Are there noise issues, even at fairly modest ISO values? Yes. Is it a bit of a brick? Yes again.

It's still the single best camera of its type on the market. I had high hopes for the Nikon P6000, but those were dashed by its write performance and loss of settings when shooting RAW. The G10 has a well-implemented feature set, good controls, and very good image performance over a range of reasonably bright conditions. While its imaging performance falls off in other conditions, so does that of lesser cameras as well - the difference is just not that dramatic.

The best alternative right now is probably Panasonic's Lumix DMC-LX3. While it does not have a viewfinder and involves other compromises I would not make, there is no doubt whatsoever that its imaging performance is excellent - and surpasses that of the G10.

Long story short: Until better sensors come along, the G10 is the best you will find. Fortunately, as the hype is subsiding because of the emergence of reviews showing the real performance of this camera (i.e., including its limitations), prices are starting to come down just a bit as well.

UPDATED! - November 25th, 2008. Digital Photography Review (dpreview dot com)finally published a review of this camera. It just missed the highly recommended category, making recommended (only). The camera was knocked down somewhat by its poor noise performance (some noise evident even at 80 ISO), some chromatic aberration, and barrel distortion (the latter at wide angles), and highlight clipping. It got good marks for build quality and handling, controls, RAW performance, decent flash, good stabilization, and good included software.

While I love reader reviews, when it comes to purchasing, I like a review by a 50 years in the business professionnal photographer with photographs to illustrate his review and this is what you get when a head to head is done between a $40,000.00 Hasselblad and a $500.00 Canon G10. See the surprising results at:http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/kidding.shtml

He also does a fine Canon G10-Panasonic LX3-Nikon 6000-Canon G9 comparison on the same website.Again the Canon G10 is a clear winner.

MY MOVE FROM THE G7 to the G10.

I own and really like the Canon G7. I passed on purchasing the G9, not seeing much that would attract me over the G7. But as I read about the G10, I began to see enough new stuff to make it sound interesting to me. Little did I guess what a huge leap up this purchase was going to be.

I'll try to focus here on items you may not have read about in the reviews below, or at least items that may not have been covered in any detail.

Overall, the feel and build of the G10 is simply great. Nothing about it feels flimsy or cheap to me. It has a bigger grip on the right front where your fingers wrap around the camera and the camera is a delight to hold and use.

The LCD is now 3" of course, and much sharper and crisper than my G7. The G10 still uses my SD and SD HC (SD High Capacity) cards and I am happy about that.

I wanted to test the new "I-Contrast" feature I had been hearing about, so I sat my wife in the bay window with a fully sunlit window behind her. I took a series of photographs from several feet away, focusing (with face detect) on her face.

With the test shots where I had "I-Contrast" turned off, her face was visible but pretty dark as were the interior walls around the window behind her. Not an unusable picture, but certainly not a good picture either. I was surprised they were as good as they were but I still wanted better than this.

So I enabled "I-Contrast" and shot the same scene. The results were a very pleasant surprise. The outside scene through the window was still slightly overblown ... almost exactly as in the first series. But my wife's face and the interior walls were now much more properly exposed and the pictures were truly usable ... something most of us would be happy to have taken. It was clear that "I-Contrast" really does work and since it is easy (using the camera menu) to engage "I-Contrast" I will certainly be using that feature often in contrasty scenes where I want to avoid harsh black shadows.

I was quite impressed with the quality of this new lens. I thought I had a sharp crisp lens on my G7 but the lens on my G10 is a definite step up. Or maybe it is the additional pixels ... whatever, the difference is remarkable and was totally unexpected.

I was a bit concerned about the loss of Optical zoom range from the zoom range available with my G7. I never used digital zoom on the G7 because it was too easy to lose picture quality and I didn't want to risk that. But I had read about a new feature of the G10 where it if you set the digital zoom to "standard", the camera would combine Optical and Digital zoom and allow you to seamlessly use them together up to a point just shy of where picture degradation would begin. Then it would stop zooming. If you then tried to zoom some more, the G10 will allow that but you will then be digital zooming into the range where there is a risk of picture degradation. All very clever I thought, but did it actually work?

I decided to test that. I sat the camera on a block wall and shot the street sign across the intersection (about 150 feet). As I expected, when I zoomed in the zoom ran seamlessly to what appeared to be maximum and stopped. I took the picture. Then I twisted the zoom button again and sure enough, the zoom continued zooming (into the possible degradation zone) to the true maximum zoom using not only all optical capability but ALL digital capability.

I fired up my computer and loaded the first shot ... the "standard" zoom. Taken at 14.7 Mega Pixels, I was immediately stunned by the quality of the shot. It wasn't just good, it was simply flawless! There was absolutely nothing about that shot that I wanted to improve except, perhaps, it still didn't bring the street sign all that close. So, using my photo editor, I just kept zooming in on the street sign until it virtually filled my monitor ... and the image was STILL FLAWLESS! I simply couldn't believe my eyes. Color was perfect, edges of the lettering were crisp and absolutely sharp. There was nothing for me to improve in a photo editor. I was stunned. (I may have even laughed out loud). Even the leaves of the mesquite tree in my neighbor's yard which is some 20 feet behind the sign were all visible and definable. WOW! WOW! WOW!

Then I loaded the next shot where I had zoomed the G10 out until it paused, then zoomed more to push the combination of Optical and Digital zoom to the absolute limit. To keep it short: It was about as good as I was used to getting from my G7 using Optical zoom only ... which is OK, but not truly sharp, crisp and the green color of the sign looked somewhat faded. Also the tree leaves in the background were no longer distinct ... Again this is not a picture you'd throw away by any means and one which could be improved with some work in Photoshop but even with that effort, it would be nothing near the quality I could get with the G10s method of combining Optical and just the right amount of Digital zoom. And the G10 gave it to me without any additional effort whatsoever.

My future approach to photography of distant objects in the future was immediately obvious. I will use the G10's built in magic (as I did in the first zoom shot) and then simply crop and enlarge the crop to the size I want for flawless, effortless results.

As I said, I skipped the G9 so I cannot compare the G9 and the G10, but I couldn't be happier with my decision to upgrade my G7 to the G10. The G10 clearly takes this type of photography to a new level with features, a great lens and picture quality.

For several years, I actually had a $6,500 setup including the Canon Mark II and some "L" glass lenses. It was heavy, cumbersome and took pictures which, as expected, cried out for work in Photoshop. Professional cameras produce pictures that expect the photographer to work on them. While I enjoyed fiddling with the pictures from the Mark II, I eventually tired of that weight, bulk and switching lenses so I gave the camera to my son. Now, that I have this G10, I will never look back.

I guess I will need Photoshop again if I try to take pictures in the dark with the G10, it does have a bit more noise at higher ISOs. And if you are a true pro, you will probably rant and rave about noise at higher ISOs I suppose.

For the rest of us, the pictures up to ISO 400 are quite acceptable and if are really picky, noise removal is simple enough to accomplish with Photoshop or any other software capable of noise reduction. In real life, I guess I don't shoot much where I use ISOs beyond 400 anyway.

I have owned cameras all my life and I have never owned a camera I liked more than this G10, or from which I got better pictures right out of the camera than this G10. This camera is Worth every penny to me.