The new camera I purchased arrived and I took it on my recent trip to Singapore to try it out. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Let’s start with the good news:
The Good
The camera was small, lightweight and easy fit into the front pocket of my jeans. It went from completely off to ready to snap a quick pic very fast; I never ended up missing a shot that I wanted. It also was fast when it came to actually taking, saving and prepping for the next shot. I really liked the wifi capabilities; it allowed me to quickly save all photos from the day online – or onto my laptop or mobile device. That’s one of the things I use to hate about actual cameras: you’d have to either link up to your computer or plug the SD Card into your computer to transfer your images. Not in this case – loved this feature.
Canon PowerShot G9 X Mark II
The Bad
First off, as I said before, I’d been using my various Samsung Galaxy phones for my main photo taking projects for years now. It took me longer to get use to using a camera again. The screen on this machine was less than a third of the size of the screen on my phone. I wasn’t use to such a small screen and it took me longer to acclimate than I thought it would, but after a couple of days of use, it got better.
The thing I hated the most – the optical zoom. I knew going in that it only had 3X optical zoom and I thought that would be fine – hell, my phone doesn’t have an optical zoom at all! My previous cameras, both Nikon Coolpix, had 10X-18X optical zoom. 3X was just too little for me. I found that while I wasn’t needing huge zoom capabilities, I wasn’t getting the shots I wanted. It was killing me.
The Return
I ended up using my phone as my camera for a lot of my trip to Singapore. I did use my new camera quite a bit, but wasn’t sold that the pictures would be what I wanted, so I took additional photos with my phone – just to be sure I wasn’t disappointed. So, since I bought this camera on Amazon, I logged, and filed a return. Dropping the camera off at my office’s UPS drop, it was out of my hair and my refund was credited to my credit card (and my gift cards replenish) just two days later.
I still want a real camera, but I think I know what I want and don’t want a little better now. I’m going to still try for a point and shoot camera, but this time with a larger optical zoom – hopefully my next incarnation will keep all the great things I loved about the Canon PowerShot G9 X Mark II.
How critical is an optical zoom for you? Any additional suggestions on cameras I should try out?