Canon PowerShot G9

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Performance

Performance remains essentially unchanged from the G7. Time to first shot is a quick 1.7 seconds, though not quite as fast as the G7's 1.5-second start. In bright light, a relatively quick focus helps keep the shutter lag to a manageable 0.5 second. In dim light, that increases to a second.

Image Quality

The 3-inch LCD is reasonably easy to see in bright sunlight and has a wide viewing angle, but on playback, images tend to look a bit softer with more blown-out highlights than they actually do--you may want to hold off deleting images until you view them on a full-size display. Though the viewfinder remains larger and more usable than most, we think we were happier with the smaller LCD and bigger optical model on the G7. Despite its decent movie-capture quality, without the ability to zoom the lens during video, we find the feature less useful on the G9 than on other cameras.

For more details on the G9's image quality, click on the image.

As it uses the same lens as the G7, its similar distortion issues come as no surprise. But Canon probably tweaked the image-processing a bit, because photos this go-round had fewer artifacts. Among the G9's good qualities you'll find an excellent noise profile--photos hold detail well as high as ISO 400--and as usual Canon's exposure and white balance hold up quite well; it renders realistically saturated colors without going overboard.

Despite the distortion, the lens holds sharpness from edge to edge; there's little purple fringing, though some magenta and cyan aberration does occur.

The Canon PowerShot G9 gets a leg up over its predecessor by improving photo quality and restoring raw-format support while maintaining the same excellent performance and body design. You probably can't miss with this model as a compact backup for your dSLR.

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