Canon Powershot G16 camera just the right fit for an amateur

Hamburg, with its rich maritime history, was the perfect location for this amateur photographer to test out the Canon Powerspot G16.

Canon PowerShot G16. Courtesy Canon

Hamburg – city of the frozen waterways. A perfect place to trial Canon’s Powershot G16, the latest compact camera in Canon’s G series.

Having watched Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips on the inbound flight, I was keen to take as many photos of oversized container ships as possible. And Hamburg is the place to do so, as it boasts the world’s third largest port.

I’m no camera whiz, but I wanted to see how easy it was for an amateur with a tourist’s curiosity about a foreign environment to take pretty holiday snaps with the G16.

The answer — very. The camera is quick and easy to use, and its interface is uncluttered.

It can connect through Wi-Fi to local devices, enabling you to wirelessly transfer photos and images. This is handy, although in this post-Snapchat world the feature is not as useful as an instant sharing feature might be. In testing, it was easier just to plug it in.

Resolution is monumental at 12.1 megapixels, and the camera’s HD video shooting at 60fps beats even The Hobbit’s frame rate.

It is also faster than any camera I have used. Its thinking time is brief, and it autofocuses with great speed. This is down to its new processor, the DIGIC 6. Cannon says it’s 50 per cent faster than the G15’s CPU, which means you can go from a deactivated camera to a completed photo in about two seconds.

The downside – it is not cheap. At Dh1,600, more affordable models for novices exist, but the UAE seems to have won out in the exchange rate-pricing battle, since the same product costs about Dh3,000 in the United Kingdom. That is a healthy discount.

But for the money, it is a wonderful tool.

Q&A

What did you take photos of?

Oh, the boats – there’s an awful lot of boats of Hamburg. Big boats, little boats, tugboats, steamer boats – lots of boats. And so many boat-related things: a maritime museum, which housed 40,000 miniature boats, many fish restaurants, which served fish fresh from Hamburg’s rivers, drydocks by the dozen, cargo cranes stacked in families, and luxury yachts moored for repairs.

Did the Canon G16 perform well?

It got a little damp thanks to the European weather conditions but survived. Because it’s a very fast camera, it was very useful when suddenly you spy a suitable photographic subject – for instance, the large tanker suddenly appearing off your stern – and you want to snap the giant, juddering thing that’s rapidly bearing down on your ferry. Taking lots of landscape shots with a 16:9 aspect ratio made Hamburg feel very filmic.

Were you worried you were going to drop it?

Yes. I fastened it to my neck to prevent this. Extreme ferry turbulence threatened at one point to send the G16 careering into the watery depths, so keeping a firm grip on this nifty little gadget is important.

Will you buy one?

A camera reviewer never reveals his secrets. But, yes probably.