Canon PowerShot G9 X Mark II Compact Digital Camera w/ 1 Inch Sensor and 3inch LCD (Black) and SanDisk 64GB UHS-I Card

Incredible camera for its clarity and portability. The night features made my trip to Guatemala a great success. I was warned prior to buying that it would be no better than a new iPhone camera, well those assumptions were wrong. High recommend for an easy to operate point and shoot if you are going on any long travel trips and want to pack light.

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This camera, like many of the Canon cameras I have used over the years, takes a very good picture. This camera though, takes a photo similar to my $1,000.+ camera and that is surprising. The video was also outstanding and I was very surprised that such great photo quality could be achieved at this price point. The only thing that is seriously lacking for me is a viewfinder. In daylight it is very hard to get a precise idea of the finished shot with just a display. A display shows a general idea of the subject, a viewfinder shows you exactly what the finished pic will be. If you are used to display cameras only, than this is a big winner ! Either way I would definitely recommend this camera, is does fit in a pocket or small carry bag, and it takes first-rate pics !

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I know. Were past the point of needing to carry a separate camera because the cameras on our phones have become so much better. And they have. But a lot of the promises for great shots in low light or zooming in havent really held up. Not in my experience, anyway. I really love this camera. I love the bokeh effect when Im taking food shots (Im one of those people). I love the ease for changing the aperture to get more light. I love the zoom (although if you push into digital zoom the quality of the shot is diminished, so I stick with going no more than 3x with the camera and then zooming in edit). I love being able to wirelessly transfer the shots from camera to phone. Lightweight. Holds a charge. Picture quality is so much improved over other point and shoots thanks to a much larger sensor. I love it.

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I purchased this camera about 6 months ago and have used it on four trips so far. I’m not a professional photographer but this handy little camera has produced great keepsake photos (to my untrained-eye). It works well in a variety of settings: from close-ups of food to wide-angled city skylines; no-flash Christmas lights to sunny days outside. I love the Bluetooth feature that can wirelessly link the camera to my phone. After an afternoon’s worth of sightseeing, I can select and download the good pictures to my phone and then share those pictures with friends while recounting my adventures during dinner. I also found the touch-screen super useful: set the focal point; swipe through photos; asking a stranger to simply touch the screen to take a photo (a lot of people struggle looking for the shutter button on top of any camera!). It has worked well for me during the last four trips I’ve taken and I look forward to bringing it along on my future trips.

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Excellent photo quality for such a compact camera. Loads of features and tons of flexibility. Im not much of a video shooter so cant coment on those capabilities, but I bought this to replace an aging Fujitsu compact that I carried everwhere. It took no time to get familiar with the cameras excellent control layout/structure (In fairness, I do have a couple of regularly used Canon DSLs, so that may have helped get me up to speed on the G9 X mkII). I found the G9 focusing to be quick and spot on, and the metering scheme to be mostly accurate. The LCD display is bright enough with very good resolution. The flash has a limited range, but works ok out to about 12 or so feet. Plenty of ISO range. When I get in a serious shootinng mode, I break out my Canon 5D or 6D and a few appropriate lenses for the situation. This is fine, when my focus is 100% on photography. But when traveling, at a gathering of friends and family, or just out and about town and country, having a great little pocket shooter at the ready means getting so many good shots that simply wont wait until you pull out your big ole DSL and snap on the best lens. Meanwhile, the G9 X mkII can be ready to shoot in seconds snapping off shots that are way, way better than my Google Pixel 2 cell phone snapper can deliver. With a slightly smaller, or maybe just a slimmer, profile than my retiring Fuji, dropping this light and compact unit in a pocket is even easier. So far this mighty little shooter has 100% exceeded my expectations. I expect to get as many years of service with this new pocket gem as my trusty old Fuji pocket snapper.

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I will start off by saying this is the best compact camera Ive ever used. The menus and settings are intuitive giving me the ability to drill down into how much I want to do manually vs. automatically. The touch screen responsive such a great idea where once I was limited to pressing buttons - and, it supports gestures like pinch to zoom and touch to focus. It takes great pictures for a compact camera and does well in high contrast scenes as well as low light. The retro styling is reminiscent of a vintage Leica M6 chrome Gold Dragon. Its small yet the screen is large and bright. It does everything - movies, still photos, macro photography, manual focus, and most important raw format. My favorite feature is the exposure lock which allows me to dial in the shutter/aperture combination Id like for the intended exposure i.e. if I want to blur the background I simply open the aperture and not need to rely on digital magic. Yet, I nearly returned it after looking at the first photographs. This is NOT my idea of a "point and shoot" camera. Its a compact camera which requires a learning curve and has firmware which fights with you rather than helping you to take great pictures. My idea of a phd camera (Press Here Dummy) is that if I set the dial to "AUTO" or "P" I expect the camera to take the photograph in the best possible way. This is sadly not the case. Here are all the gotchas, some of which can be compensated for by learning to use "C" custom settings and custom scenes. My first photographs were both blotchy and grainy. The camera defaults to ISO 320 rather than AUTO, even in a brightly lit scene. The noise filter was turned all the way up to compensate. The better idea is to set the ISO to the lowest possible setting to reduce noise on a bright day for the best clarity. I also used the "Fine Detail" scene. I thought it was a good idea at the time. What this does, however, is crank up the sharpening filter which produces unwanted blotches and artifacts. In fact, most of the so-called scenes are just combinations of 6 settings, 3 of which are sharpening. Sharpening should not be done in the camera. If you want a sharper photo use a tripod and focus carefully. One of the great features is combination AF+MF which allows you to autofocus then tweak in for perfect sharp focus. Thats how you get sharp photos. Dont use the built-in sharpening because it wont look as nice. Automatic White Balance was fine outdoors but indoors under LED lighting it had a difficult time. Yet, the custom white balance was great, once I figured out how to use it. You need to first take a photograph of something mostly white, then get into the settings for custom white balance. It took me a while to figure it out. Im used to a single-button, "press shutter for custom white" but this is a confusing multi-step process. Its worth learning how to use it and obtain a white balance card. 20.1 megapixels. True, but you get that resolution at the expense of digital zoom and image stabilization. Digital Zoom uses your unused pixels to magnify the image. If you use all 20meg of them theres nothing left to zoom. Solution: use the full resolution and crop your photos with your PC while ditching the digital zoom. Image stabilization? yea, kinda. Once again the camera uses your unused pixels to lock in on the photograph to eliminate unwanted movement blur. You loose this feature if you shoot at full resolution or save your RAW files. Solution: Use a tripod or enforce a higher shutter speed using shutter speed priority setting or locked AE to reduce motion blur and forget about image stabilization. Geo-tagging? yea, kinda. Its mentioned in the manual and is a function of the camera if (big IFF - If and only If) you shoot your photos using the Canon smartphone app. The camera lacks GPS on its own. Bluetooth? yea, kinda. Its only for the shutter and zoom. If you want to remote view on your smartphone the app automatically switches to WiFi for those operations. Its good for selfies and selfie sticks. WiFi transfer to PC or cloud? yea, kinda. Once again, Canon cripples this functionality to force you to obtain an on-line account, transfer the images to Canons website after forcing you to agree to all kinds of stipulations about your photographs and agreeing to let them delete photographs they dont like. You need to do this just to transfer photos wirelessly to your PC located just 6 feet away. It might be fine for bloggers and tweeters but not for professionals. Despite having Bluetooth and Wifi, the most direct way to get photos off the phone is via a microUSB cable which Canon does not supply. At least its a standard connector. Or, open the bottom door and pop out the CF card to use with a card reader. The most useful software Canon provides is the RAW developing to bypass a lot of the dysfunctional automatic camera settings. Care needs to be taken with their RAW software development which *defaults* to heavy sharpening. Again, if you are shooting RAW you probably dont want to apply your sharpening filter at this stage. The first time I used it I neglected to scroll down to notice the sharpening filter defaults to ON and was disappointed with the blotches and artifacts. Solution: double-check everything and save your settings. Another helpful tip - the settings in your "C" custom profile are NOT saved by default. You need to "register" your settings. You can also toggle the automatic save to ON; else, the next time you turn your camera on it will reset all your settings. I found that if I always use the "C" setting and custom scene setting to town down the sharpening filter, lower the ISO, save my RAW files, and double-check all my settings every time then I get good quality pictures. This is not my definition of a "Point and Shoot" camera. Its a good "compact camera." I just wished Canon had chosen to make this a "smarter" camera.

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Shorter (but bulkier) than a smartphone, this camera will easily fit in a pocket or purse. It is the best, affordable compact camera I could find with a 1 inch sensor. Photography is a minor hobby of mine and Im certainly not a professional or expert. But if you are looking for a high quality camera that blows any smartphone camera out of the water, this was my favorite purchase from 2017. It is convenient to take on vacations and you will be glad you bought it after looking back at higher quality photos compared to any smartphone camera could ever take. The lost star is due to the app used to transfer photos. I have an Android phone and the app is constantly causing me problems. It takes forever and mutiple attempts to correctly sync the photos to my Android device. And once you finally get the app to consistently work, an update will reset the settings where the hassle starts all over again.

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This camera has lots of great features, but many of them are not fully implemented. One defining feature of this camera is that it has built-in bluetooth. However, the Canon Android & iOS apps have poorly implemented bluetooth functions, which do exactly what the WiFi functions do except the bluetooth is much slower. So whats the point of having bluetooth? Well, its low power, which allows the camera to continuously or regularly connect to your smartphone and retrieve GPS coordinates. Unfortunately, the app is not capable of doing this with this camera. So having the bluetooth chip is completely useless until Canon implements this feature in the app for the G9X. Another annoying feature is that the camera takes 1-2 secs to save each photo, unless youre shooting in continuous mode, which takes several photos per second but takes even longer to save them. The third disappointment is that the G9X does not shoot panoramas. OMG, Really? All smartphones shoot panoramas! Its annoying that I have to whip out my phone anytime I shoot panoramas, which takes them with a much smaller sensor than the 1" on the G9X. Those are the 3 main negatives of the G9X, but it does have 3 advantages. 1st is the touchscreen works really well & smoothly, making touch focusing easy and changing settings fast. 2nd is the size and weight of the camera make it really portable; I can easily slip the phone into my pocket and it weighs like your phone + keys. Thats amazing considering the G9X has a 1" sensor and 3X zoom. 3rd advantage is the cost; only $429 as of June 2017. Ill compare the G9X with 2 of its competitor: Canon G7X markII and Sony RX100M2, which both have 1" sensor and image stabilization like the G9X. The Canon camera app is absolutely the worst camera app Ive ever used. As stated above, you cannot get GPS coordinates for the photos by bluetooth, which defeats the purpose of having it! The settings are hard to find in different pages, and the defaults are set to really stupid values. For instance, by default when youre transferring photos by wifi, the default is to transfer reduced quality/ size photos instead of the original image. Also, by default when transferring photos by wifi, the GPS coordinates will not be transferred (even though Canon makes you manually save & set the GPS). To keep the GPS coordinates with the photos, you must take out the SD card, insert it into your computer, and manually transfer the photos. OMG, Really?! Canon G9X markII, Pros: smallest size & weight with a 1" sensor, smooth & useful touchscreen, $429 (as of June 2017) Cons: useless bluetooth (unless Canon fixes its app), takes 1-2 secs to save each photo, no panorama mode Canon G7X markII, Pros: more zoom (4.2X), tiltable screen, 3X brighter lens at zoomed range (same at wide range) Cons: same as G9X camera, also $250 more; does not have bluetooth so it can never be upgraded for auto GPS Sony RX100M2, Pros: more zoom (3.6X), tiltable screen, faster photo saving & better object tracking Cons: no touchscreen, no bluetooth, no built-in ND filter (which Canon has), also $150 more Although the G9X has several faults, its pros slightly outweighs its cons, so I kept the camera because of its relatively low cost and small size & weight. Hopefully, Canon will update its app so the camera can automatically get GPS coordinates for the photos.

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Lets get one thing out of the way. If you only shoot in daylight, and only shoot stationary targets, or if you shoot in full manual mode most of the time, Im sure this camera will be great for you. My use-case is the recording of the life of my family, particularly the adventures and misadventures of my four year old boy. We spend a fair amount of time indoors, and its the winter so there is not too much light most days. My primary target moves around a lot and has little patience for composition, fiddling with settings, or slow shutter speeds. So I find myself spending a lot of time shooting in auto or program auto. Im a casual photographer looking for a casual camera. And, as a casual camera, I was not too impressed with the G9X. The big missing feature is a minimum auto-ISO shutter speed. It does have a variable for setting the ratio at which the camera trades off ISO for shutter speed, but there are only two relevant settings: prioritize shutter speed over ISO, and vice-versa. On default settings, the camera will adjust the shutter speed to 1/20-1/60 (depending on zoom) before cranking the ISO at all. On the fast setting, it will crank the ISO to the max unless that brings the shutter speed above 1/1000. This is . . . not great. Shutter priority mode does exist, but then you forget you put it on that the next day when youre taking pictures in the park, and everything is washed out or shot with a narrow depth of field. Why cant Cannon just give me this simple knob, like its cleverer competitors have done? The other big drawback is USB charging. I could never get it to work. There was some stuff online about needing to use the original cable, so I bought one, but it still didnt work. That is pretty weak for a device of this generation. Overall, its a fine camera, if it werent for the existence of much better alternatives. I recommend any of recent RX100s, which all lack the problems Ive complained about. Most of them have wider apertures to boot. I just got rid of my G9X Mark 2 for one of these and I much prefer it.

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I was disappointed to discover that Canon does not support (and does not plan to support) wifi connection to Mac. This is a major limitation and should be spelled out more clearly.

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