Customer Reviews:
 Poor Quality Control, but great camera November 4, 2007
Spicy Tofu (Mountain View, CA United States)
55 out of 58 found this review helpful
I really love the G9. This is the perfect camera for street photography. It takes much sharper pictures than the typical point and shoot and it is much easier for me to carry around than my Canon XT. (I keep it in my messenger bag when I walk around the city.)
The 2 downsides:
1) Noise. The pictures are definitely noisy indoors, no matter how much light. However, it's not any worse than your typical P&S. (It is worse than DSLR for sure though)
2) Poor quality control. SHAME ON CANON. I'm on my fourth unit. All of them have been defective:
a) Green cast on LCD edges when the LCD is black.
b) Tilted/crooked LCD screen
c) 4 bad pixels (two red and two white)
d) Green case on LCD TOP AND BOTTOM
I've given up on getting a good unit and am keeping the last one. Of all the potential defects I've seen, the green cast on the LCD is the least bothersome (since you can only see it on dark images; in most normal cases you can't really detect it). Much rather have a bad screen than bad pixels.
I don't think I've really seen non-defective units of the G9....maybe at B&H at the store (where I bought mine), but now I think the lighting in the store just made it difficult to detect the defect (since when I looked at mine at the store, it was really hard to see the defect in the store lighting for some reason).
Again, I'm REALLY disappointed in Canon's quality control. They made a great camera, but not a single one I've seen is defect free. This is the only reason why I'm giving it 3 stars instead of 4 or 5. This also gives me great hesitancy to buy other more expensive Canon products. ($500 for the G9 is not chump change, but I can live with bad qualtiy for good design. If I spent $1,500 on a Canon 40D and had a bad screen or hot pixels I would totally go nuts.)
In addition, in reading many online forums on this issue, it seems that no one has gotten Canon to even acknowledge the LCD defective screen exists.
Finally, I give Amazon 5 stars for their customer service. Much better hassle free returns with Amazon than at one of the local big New York camera shops (they are good at making recommendations, but returns? forget about it).
 Great point & shoot for a pro October 9, 2007
Brett Harkey (Fayetteville, AR, USA)
52 out of 55 found this review helpful
I am a professional landscape photographer and I wanted a small point & shoot to have handy to grab pictures of my family as well as keep in the car at all times. The G9 delivers on all counts. I was waiting for Canon to release a point & shoot that could capture in RAW format, and when I heard about the G9 and after hearing lots of great things about the G7, I knew this would be the camera for me. The G9 is built like a tank for a point & shoot, captures beautiful images and is easy enough for my wife to use! My only beef is that the images get quite noisy at ISO's above 200, but that's the nature of the small sensor in a point & shoot. In most cases, it delivers very clean images. I like the manual dials on the top that allow me to very quickly choose the shooting mode and ISO. This is also a great camera to shoot in scenarios when you want to be a little more inconspicuous - great for street shooting. Overall, I am very happy with the G9.
 Pro-grade SLR alternative November 27, 2007
Jeff in Baltimore (Baltimore, MD United States)
51 out of 51 found this review helpful
I have been shooting with manual focus, manual exposure SLR systems since I was twelve years old. That's almost thirty years using kit like the Olympus OM-1 (my first love, too bad it was stolen!), Pentax MX, numerous lenses, professional flash equipment like Vivitar 283 and Sunpak 383. My cousin asked me to shoot her wedding, so I thought maybe the time had finally come to switch to digital.
Okay, so maybe I'm old school, and maybe I have some unrealistic expectations for modern equipment, but every time I looked at the digital SLR offerings, I was disappointed. Even the Nikons (well, the affordable ones like the D70 and D80) were polycarbonate bodies with plastic lenses. Not professional-grade. Do you have to pay thousands of dollars to get a metal-bodied SLR today? Something built to withstand a 5 fps motor drive, like in the old days? Well, I looked at the Pentax K10D -- metal body, reasonably affordable, fully compatible with all my lenses -- but I just had this vague sense of dissatisfaction. These fragile contraptions are big, clunky, dare I say dorky compared to an old film SLR. Hey, and don't let any dust get on the sensor. Sheesh, talk about wearing kid gloves.
Then a friend told me about the Canon G9. Whoa, paradigm shift here, folks. I hadn't considered a non-SLR, but I sure am glad I did. This thing has pro-grade features: aperture and shutter priority modes as well as full manual exposure, manual focus, RAW capability, decent optical zoom range, spot metering, a hot shoe that works with all my existing flash gear, and many other things that usually only make it into SLR's.
For example, with most P&S cameras, shutter lag is a huge problem. Good portraits demand instant shutter response. The G9's shutter is almost instantaneous SO LONG AS you half-press to lock the focus, and compose with the optical viewfinder (i.e, turn the LCD off). I am getting great portraits of my kids using this technique, and it does feel a bit like using an old Leica rangefinder. Never understood why anyone would give up an SLR; now I get it. Quiet, easily concealed, doesn't announce "I AM A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER!" or otherwise make you look or feel like a dork. The optical viewfinder zooms pretty closely with the lens, and parallax has not been a problem. I wear eyeglasses and the viewfinder works just fine with them; in fact, better than with my MX. When using the viewfinder, the LCD just displays important camera information: shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, stuff like that. I've found it's pretty easy to glance down at the LCD to check those things, then return to composing in the viewfinder.
For those moments when I really need to see exactly what's in the frame, I switch to composing with the LCD. This is handy to set the manual exposure, too. I shot some pics of my kids in front of the fireplace and in front of the Christmas tree, with available light, and I just dialed down the shutter speed in manual mode until the exposure looked right in the LCD. And what an LCD -- again, it's SLR-grade.
Overall, the build quality is phenomenal for this price. It feels solid. Others have compared it to a tank, or a swiss watch, or a Leica. It is very enjoyable to hold and use. Taking pictures is fun again!
Video capability is a bonus, too, that you won't find on SLR's. I'm not a big video shooter, but I have two young kids and there'll be times when I want it. Back when I was looking at SLR's, I always figured I'd need to purchase a separate (cheap) video camera, maybe a Pure Digital Flip model. Not anymore.
The G9 is not perfect. Some shortcomings can be overcome or compensated for, while others simply can't. I am disappointed with the noise above ISO 200. Autofocus is not as fast as an SLR. Wide-angle zoom isn't as wide as I'd really like. The retractable lens looks a bit fragile to me. I recommend the Lensmate lens adapter for when you think you might bump into things. It's anodized aluminum, so it's rugged; unfortunately, it really sticks out into the optical viewfinder, cutting off about half the view. Well, that's when you go with the LCD, I guess. Works of man fall short of perfection, and all gear has strengths and limitations. Learn them and use them, or work around them as best you can. There are lighting conditions that NO digital handles well, and for those, I'm happy to continue shooting film.
But for everything else, I'm really happy with the portability, control, responsiveness, and quality of the G9. All things considered, especially that it's less than half the price of a D80 or "serious" DSLR, it is a great camera.
Plagued by stuck pixels September 23, 2007
leek (Seattle, WA, USA)
50 out of 54 found this review helpful
I have bought and returned 3 PowerShot G9 cameras because of stuck pixels.
I really like the features and size of the G9, but I cannot accept it if has stuck pixels.
The first G9 I bought had two stuck pixels in every shot I took: One bright red one near the center and one faint green one about 3/4ths to the right. The stuck pixels were present in the image files. This was a major defect.
The second G9 I bought had a bright blue stuck pixel on the LCD screen whenever the shot was previewed through the LCD viewfinder, but no stuck pixels in review mode (when the LCD was viewing pictures but not taking them), and no stuck pixels on uploaded pictures. This one was strange -- a distracting blue dot on your LCD viewfinder which isn't a permanent LCD display defect but always appears in camera mode. I suspect a software bug or something with the lenses/mirrors which only affects the LCD viewfinder.
The third G9 I bought had a faint green pixel stuck on the LCD. I have not fully tested the extent of this stuck pixel (LCD, CCD, etc.) yet, because I will be returning the G9.
I bought these three G9s from different venues (stores), and all had these problems. But since they were all right after the G9 was first released, it's possible they all came from the same bad manufacturing lot.
Great camera, great features, great size, so long as you don't get stuck pixels.
I've reluctantly switched to a S5 IS. I'd rather have 8 megapixels which work, than 12 megapixels which are a crap-shoot.
More megapixels is not always better, and Canon seems to have spread the pixels too far in the G9.
Caveat emptor.
 Extremely disappointed January 29, 2008
Ken from CA. (California)
44 out of 75 found this review helpful
I was very happy when I first received the camera, it was great. For almost a month. then one day I turned the camera on, the lens extended to the maximum position, and got stuck. the display said lens error, so I tired cycling power, and even removed the battery, but nothing changed. Not wanting to have to send it back, I thought since I could hear a motor turn after the camera was powered up, that I might be able to fix it if something was loose. Wrong. There is a ring around the lens, and the user manual said that if you press the ring release button, you could rotate the ring and change lenses. This didn't work so well, the lens became loose, so I had to send it back to Canon.
I sent it to their repair facility, and they sent me a letter saying since the lens was broken, they would have to charge me $120. I agreed to that, since I shouldn't have attempted to fix it myself, but then a week or so later they called me up at 7am to tell me they couldn't fix it at all. They said when they looked further, the noticed that there was damage from liquid. I told them this was not possible, as the camera was never exposed to liquids while it was in my possession. One of their reps said something about corrosion, but I don't think I owned it long enough for it to be corroded by anything I would have done anyway.
So I am out the $500 I paid for it, and I will never buy another Canon product again. It's their word against mine, and I know the camera was never exposed to liquids while I owned it, so they are calling me a liar. My only recourse, as I told them, is to tell everybody I know they can't be trusted. So here I am, telling even people I don't know, don't trust Canon. I am sure that most of you will be happy with your Canon product, but for the small percentage who aren't as lucky, it seems like they don't have to honor their warranty.
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