MikeBrum.com

My Canon PowerShot A710-IS is pretty much dying. Let me rephrase that: the camera is still in GREAT shape and takes great pictures, but the camera just burns through fresh batteries in about a half hour. The fact that the images it takes are still great is the only shame.

Despite owning a Canon 30D (which I use for my more “serious” underwater photography) and a Canon 5D mkII (which I use for almost everything else), I like keeping a point and shoot for situations when I don’t want to take all my gear — be it because I don’t want to take a bag with me to carry the camera or because we’re going to be snorkeling and my full underwater rig is 100% overkill.

Up until recently, the A710-IS has performed those duties very well. And when faced with the decision of what to replace it with, the Canon G12 quickly rose to the top of the list.

Even though I’ve only had it for about 2 days, here’s what I like about the G12:

• It can be used as a “real” camera with consideration given to manual settings
• All the options for those manual settings are very easy to access (many P&S cameras do have manual settings – but they’re VERY hard to get to making them almost unusable)
• The tilt & swivel LCD is really nice
• Natively shoots RAW without any wonky firmware hacks
• There’s a hot shoe (yes, this is awesome)
• The visual readout on the LCD is great – with lots of current settings displayed, a level and a histogram
• It takes a battery pack instead of a bunch of AA’s (some people like AA’s for the flexibility)

There are a few things that I don’t like, but most of them are very minor:

• The tripod mount isn’t centered over the lens (it’s centered relative to the camera body)
• The on-cam flash casts a shadow on close objects from the lens (not uncommon for many P&S cams)
• The G12 RAW files aren’t able to be read w/ CS4 – you need to upgrade to CS5 (not really a Canon problem, but worth mentioning)

Most of the images that I’ve taken have been just shooting around the house to get familiar w/ the camera. The real test will come tomorrow when I take the G12 out on a long snorkel trip.

If there are any good photos or if I run into any problems, I’m sure I’ll be posting about them soon.