Back to reality (again)

And so back to the normal routine (up before dawn, commute in the dark, etc.) the holiday rapidly becomming a distant memory.

I bought a Canon G10 whilst away (I’d looked at the G9 but was put off by mixed reviews) as a replacement carry-anywhere camera. I’m very impressed with the output. I got sharper, more noise-free images under poor light with it than I managed with my DSLR.

Not exactly working the camera to the edge of it’s ability but was very impressed with both the auto ISO an auto WB (using aperture priority). The White Balance gave life-like colours under a variety of lighting conditions including mixed situations. The auto ISO gave me the lowest ISO (rather than the ‘best’ and probably higher range. It also allowed the use of intermediate values not possible to set manually (such as 320) Which again traded ease for quality – the right trade-off in my opinion.

With that and being small, light, almost 15mp and RAW – what more could I ask from a high-end compact? Shame it’s not supported yet by Adobe or Apple in their editing apps.

I was also impressed with the very high ISO setting OBP set up as a custom feature (without asking 1st!) on my Canon 40D. I got pretty decent night pictures (properly dark, not dusk) of the Eiffel Tower at 3200 handheld. There’s even enough light to see detail of the people in the foreground.

I do want to deal with the noise that’s visible though. I hear good things about Noise Ninja but OBP tells me it needs some serious playing with to get decent results.

It’s not cheap though so I want to know it will work before I fork out for it.