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Canon G10 Camera

Canon G10 Camera

I’ve been a semi-serious photographer for many years and, in the heyday of film, owned virtually every kind of camera on the market–from Sinar, Deardorf, and Toyo 8x10s to Linhof, Sinar, and Toyo 4x5s to Hasselblad, Mamiya, and Rollei 2-1/4s to Nikon, Leica, Canon, Minolta, and Contax 35s. Though my experience with digital cameras is relatively limited, I have to say that–compared to film cameras–Canon’s latest “advanced” point-and-shooter, the 15Mp G10, is a model of excellence and convenience. Yes, it is noisier and a touch softer and less dynamic than bigger-sensor cameras, particularly at ISOs above 400. But it is so so easy to use and carry and, with a little bit of Lightroom touch up (or Noiseware’ing above ISO 400), the quality of its images is so astonishingly high that I hardly ever trot out my full-frame SLR and all those expensive “prime” lenses anymore. I’m truly sold on this little automated workhorse, which, thanks to its built-in rangefinder and excellent lens (which zooms from 28mm to 140mm), feels and functions to me like a tiny, lightweight Leica. Currently priced at about $429, it is a superb deal.

Although the G10’s is somewhat limited at higher ISOs. It ain’t bad. Here, for an instance, is a snap taken in Amsterdam as 200 ISO.

Canon G10 Camera

And below is a snap taken (handheld–the G10 has a very effective Image Stabilization system) in Istanbul at the famous Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque) at 800 ISO.

This was shot as a JPEG (while we were in Europe I shot JPEG to conserve space on the G-10 memory card–those 15Mp RAW files really eat up space, even on a 8GB SDHC card). I prefer the post flexibility and image quality of RAW, but the G-10’s JPEGs actually look pretty good. Canon G10 Camera

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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