Canon PowerShot G10 Features, Foibles, and Misgivings

As an amateur photographer, I once owned a Panasonic SLR that has worked wonders for me for a couple of years. I decided, though, that it was high time I kept up with the technology and entered the digital age. My first gadget was a point-and-shoot camera, and I was quite frustrated due to the lack of flexibility if offered and the poor quality. Don't get me wrong, it was alright for taking shots at a barbecue and in the office, but I needed something more.
I wanted to get a DSLR, but I couldn't even get close to buying one, the price was too high. Also, I wanted something more portable, preferably a camera that would fit in my pocket. I didn't want to carry it around in a bag. Nevertheless, I needed one that would give me decent control over aperture and focus. After reading a lot of reviews, I decided to try the Canon PowerShot G10. I bought it less than a month ago, and already took close to 10,000 shots. Here is what I think about it so far.
- All auto modes work great, but you can override most settings manually and get even better results. - With an ISO setting around 400 there is considerable noise, but nowhere close to what I was getting on my old SLR film camera. I was able to reduce it considerably with Photoshop and got some surprisingly good indoor pictures. - Face recognition works seamlessly without any additional settings. The portraits in auto mode look natural, without over-exposures. Red eye reduction is also decent, I barely had to do any post-processing tweaks to remove the demon-looking eyes. - The built-in scene settings satisfy any amateur photographer's needs. The list is quite exhaustive, and includes night, sunset, underwater and snow modes. The effects worked as if I had used Photoshop on the raw picture, which saved me a lot of time. - A major drawback is that the RAW files created by this camera cannot be open by Photoshop CS3. A workaround I found was to convert them to TIFF's, which eats up quite a lot of disk space (close to 100 megabytes for each picture). Luckily I own two 500 gigabytes hard drives, so free space is not an issue for me. I contacted Adobe on this issue and they hope they will add support for the G10 in the near future.
To wrap it up, Canon PowerShot is a great camera, so far it has worked great for my purposes. I would recommend it to anyone who needs more control than a regular point-and-shoot can offer, but is not yet ready to move to a DSLR.
Getting the perfect Canon camera, is never an easy thing, especially with the way digital technology is constantly changing. Fortunately, there are plenty of helpful websites online, that can narrow down your search and help you find the camera with all the features important to you.
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