Great piece of kit!

I use professional Nikon DSLRs, and like other people, wanted a small camera I could put in my pocket when I travel light. I travel a lot, and I have bought maybe five or six compact digitals over the last few years, hoping to find one which really filled my need. The Canon G9 looked and felt right as soon as I got it out of the box, and I was just hoping that it's image quality lived up to it's appearance. It does. It is much much better than any other compact I have used.

It is really "usable" and encourages one to take photo after photo. The controls have a logic about them and it's easy to be creative. Manual mode is excellent. RAW image mode (you have to work out how to tell the camera to store them) gives great control and produces better "post production" images. The main drawback is that with such a small sensor using 12.1 million pixels, there is more noise over 400iso than with a DSLR. If this bothers you then stick to DSLR's.

So, all in all, a really great piece of kit!