James A
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.