Early Christmas for me...

I've never been one for waiting when it comes to gadgets or cameras... I buy it when I want to especially if I can get a deal on the thing I've been obsessing about.

So, yesterday when I opened up the morning paper and the large pull-out ad told me I could get the Canon G10 for less than even I thought I could talk the sales people down to, I decided it was a sign from above. It no longer was a question of if I was going to get this camera, but whether I was going to be able to get it that day.

I went to work and got my assignments and then headed straight over to the store.

The Canon rep was giving the sales people a rundown on the new 5d mkII when I walked in and again feeling it was a sign from above I asked if I could have a look. My boss recently put in a request for a couple of them in his budget proposal for next year. It is definitely a nice camera and one I look forward to using. Hopefully.

From the store I had to go to the Manitoba Legislature to shoot the Throne Speech. I felt this could be a good test of it's capabilities straight out of the box.

First off, I really like the exposure compensation dial... in a pinch instead of trying to figure out how to change the shutter speed and aperture I used it in P mode and dialed down the exposure for the scrums that happen after the big speech.

Shot with an ISO of 400 at 1/50 sec at f/2.8 the camera's auto white balance did a great job, better than my 1d mkIIn which gave me a slight yellow cast from the lights on the half dozen TV cameras.

The image is very large (twice the size of my 1d mkIIn) but the chip is small and viewing the image at 100% shows the resulting artifacts. So, though my mkIIn is only 8MP compared to the G10's 14MP the image produced from the mkIIn is much smoother and less pixly.

G10

1D MkIIn

So, conclusion is it's a keeper. Thanks Santa for the early gift. ;)

If you were wondering who that is in the photos, it's Jon Gerrard the leader of the Liberal Party of Manitoba, and yes he obviously forgot to take the stickers off his new glasses. Ouch. I didn't get a chance to watch the television coverage of the speech. My paper didn't use the scrum photo, but rather the photo of him listening to the speech from the throne without his glasses on.