Canon PowerShot G7 Digital Camera

The reason I chose this camera was a hang-up I have had for a long time: THE LENS. Like any TI gizmo, garbage in = garbage out: if you don't have a decent lens, you're off to a bad start - no matter how much you play with it on the computer (and I've got better things to do with my time). Light is received as a square of lens diameter so light-capturing is important, particularly in poor light: for social use, that's a lot of the time. I've also found that the camera you have with you tends to take better photos than the superb piece of kit on top of the wardrobe...

So my need was something with a good lens, well put together and with enough facilities to take good pictures and effects yet small enough to have it with me when I need it. For me, the Canon G7 gets this just right. I can wear it on my belt but it's big enough to set the controls quickly and the large sharp 2.5" screen is fine. Also - from experience - do NOT buy a camera without an optical viewfinder. This camera has as good a screen as I've found but, on a bright sailing weekend, in direct sun, the screen was useless.

My former camera - a Fuji Finepix F700 - £250 at the time - was more compact but took much inferior available light shots and my decision to go for this sort of camera followed experience where I took pics with a friend at an evening outing where we took pretty much identical shots - his camera was cheaper and larger - yet my pics were clearly inferior.

You can read all the techie stuff / features from the spec: no point repeating them here. Couple of points worth mentioning: don't put too much emphasis on mega-pixels: a greater number means smaller pixel dimension on the chip and there is diminishing return over 6. Similarly the claimed light-grabbing potential high-ISO numbers mean little. Quality on all similarly-priced cameras - especially enlarged - suffers noise probs above 800.

I read quite a lot of reviews on this camera and others in its class and found some critical of the G7. Funnily enough the criticisms reinforced my confidence in the purchase. A typical comment: "This camera has all the features and quality that the serious Single-Lens Reflex user wants yet does not deliver the quality that Sony / Pentax xyz does" (cheaper but twice as big and heavy) and "For the point and shoot photographer this is relatively expensive and won't slip in the pocket." - so it "falls between two stools."
- That's just where I want to be.
The chunky controls fall to hand, are intuitive and easy to see. There's lots of them so lots of artistic / special effects - and the movie quality is really good. On the other hand if you want to point and shoot, leave the two primary control settings on auto and you can forget it.
Gripes: not the fastest camera to fire up from cold so you can miss the odd candid shot: not all that big a deal. I didn't like the instruction booklet - or rather all three of them, with a poor index - so you had to hop about to find what you were looking for. My biggest gripe though is paying £300+ for a camera which doesn't come with a case (bear in mind this is not an SLR), having to waste a half-day trekking around Sheffield - unsuccessfully. It's deeper than the usual digital, but nothing like as big as an SLR, so standard cases don't work. This is a stupid economy.
Having got that off my chest I feel better and would mention that - apart from those couple of gripes - I would have rated the camera "excellent"