On The Street with Canon G7X

I've been trying to shoot the street with my Fujifilm XT1, but the lack of in-body/optical stabilizer, I would say that most of my shots is unusable. Perhaps I've been pampered by Olympus 5-axis in-body stabilizer so.. I feels like I really need something that really can fills my needs for street photography.

Therefore, I'm looking for a camera that has:

• A very good optical image stabilizer
• The camera body must be small (so that I can shoot in stealth mode and it can fits into my pocket)
• Must have a very good fix lens (so I don't need to purchase an additional lens for that body)
• Must have a tilt-able viewfinder
• Very economical and meet by budget
  

Based on these criteria, I've stumbled upon two models: Sony RX100 Mark 3 and Canon G7X. After reading both camera reviews online, I've choose Canon G7X because its fits all my requirements above.

What I like about this camera

Camera body & lens
Canon G7X is very sturdy. You can feel it once you have it in your hands. It's very small (and this is my first tiny camera that I've purchased - smaller than my previous Olympus EM1). The lens aperture started at f1.8 to f2.8 and the optical zoom range started at 24mm and reachable up to 100mm; plus it has an option to extend the zoom range up to 17x  via digital zoom - but I'm not using this digital zoom feature because the image quality is just stupid and hideous. So, if you purchase this camera, please turn off the digital zoom feature and just stick with it's optical zoom range. The optical zoom range is more than enough.. trust me.

The auto focus
The auto focus is very fast and snappy. So I don't have to worry of missing any shots. Even though I just turned on the camera and quickly pressed the shutter, it just snap the picture in no time. To rate the focusing speed from 1 to 5, I  choose 4 because I can say that 90% of the time the auto focus is just works.

Optical Image stabilizer
The image stabilizer is okay (of-course I can't compare with Olympus 5-axis awesomeness) but it is much better than Sony RX100 M3. As long as my image is tack sharp in any situation, I would say that the optical image stabilizer for this camera has done a very decent job.

What I hate about this camera

I purchased this camera quite recently so, the only thing that has been bugging me all the time is the video recording button. It resides just below the thumb rest area. See picture below:

Just imagine, the camera is so small and they've put the video record button just below the thumb rest area.. what the hell??! Almost every time I've accidentally press this button and the camera started recording... pfft!!

Hello Canon designer, if you are reading this blog - please DO NOT make the same mistake again! I just want to take picture okay.. and why the hell you are putting the record button at that tiny little space??

The image quality

It's a point and shoot camera... what do you expect? Even though it has one inch sensor, you still can't compare with the image quality produced by the micro 4/3 camera. For me it just suits me fine (on the image quality department) because later on I will edit the picture and turn it to black and white images. Will you pixel peep on a street photography images? I don't think so..

If you are looking for very good quality out of camera jpeg then look no further.. Fujifilm is the best of producing excellent out of camera jpeg images. Trust me.. I have one..

Summary

To sum it up.. this camera just fits my shooting needs (for street photography). As of today, I've haven't tested the ISO performance as of yet and by reading other review about this camera, it can produce a clean images up to ISO 3200 only. So.. for the price and compactness of this camera (despite the weakness I've mentioned above) this camera works just fine.

Note: I've edited the images above to fits my liking (cropping / vignetting / black & white / sharpening) and it may not represent the original output from the camera.