A little over five years ago I bought a new compact camera. I like compact cameras and I’ve never been a great lover of using my phone as my walk-about medium for taking pictures. Spoiler alert: I prefer the control that you have with a camera rather than having to jump through hoops to get the same from a mobile. I wrote about the compact on this blog and it was a Canon Powershot G7X MkII. To save you from reading that post (unless you want to) my main conclusion was:

The bottom line is that this is a truly capable, highly affordable and genuinely compact compact digital camera. A while ago I wrote that using a different compact camera just made me smile and I’m starting to develop a grin when using this new one too. That’s a good sign and I’m pretty sure that it will lead to some pictures that will make me smile too.

I also mentioned that I liked pretty much everything about it apart from the lack of a viewfinder. Over the intervening five years I have used the G7X MkII an awful lot but it has been the lack of a viewfinder that has bugged me more and more. Anyway, the camera got damaged when it fell out of my pocket one day and so I acquired a replacement and that is a Canon Powershot G5X MkII. Everything good about the G7 MkII has been carried over and with the addition of the pop-up electronic viewfinder, a marginally larger file, the CR3 file format and an extra 20mm equivalent on the telephoto end of the zoom this has made me happy again.

On recent trips to Rome and Venice I have found myself shooting hundreds of pictures with it and anything under 800 ISO has been really good for image quality. What I hadn’t really expected was how well the CR3 files would react to the AI noise reduction built into Adobe Camera RAW. I blogged last month about how I had been playing with the various noise reduction options in ACR, Topaz and DXO and I can definitely say that the files from this camera (and my work Canons) react rather well to the AI de-noise in Camera RAW. That means that I can shoot at higher ISOs with a compact without having to trust the tiny flash – and that makes me happy too.

Every day is a school day is a phrase that I’ve always found cheesy and compelling in equal measure and shooting with a small format compact brings an extra measure of truth to it. Each time I shoot with a new one I find new ways to get that little bit more out of them and that knowledge can sometimes be cross-populated to the full-frame cameras that I shoot for work. I’m not sure that could be said for me about taking pictures with a mobile phone.

Anyway, the G5X MkII is going to be around for a while longer. Given that the major manufacturers appear to have all but ceased development of compacts I guess that it’s a good thing that I’ve found one that ticks quite so many boxes.

Given that Venice is all about the light, here are a few more frames shot with the G5X MkII.