Richard Butler and Andy Westlake takes Canon's bulkycam for a ride:
"At high sensitivities the G1 X sets a new benchmark for compact cameras. You really only need to worry about noise and the effects of noise reduction at ISO 1600 and above where the Canon takes a quite heavy-handed approach towards both chroma and luminance noise. The end result are very clean pictures with slightly smeared low contrast detail.
The latter is only really visible at large magnifications and easily rectified with some custom noise reduction in raw conversion. In any case the G1 X's high ISO performance is among the best we've seen from APS-C (or similarly sized sensor) cameras. That said, the G1 X's advantage in terms of sensor and imaging pipeline performance is at least partly offset by its slow lens. Other premium compact cameras, such as the Olympus XZ-1 or the Fujifilm X10, have smaller sensors but can, thanks to their fast lenses, stick to lower ISOs in dim lighting conditions."
Will Canon ever release a compact camera system? Yes, they pretty much have to. In the meantime they stuffed an aps-c sensor in some oversized g12ish body, and came up with this:
"Shots taken at high ISO settings were consistently clean and noise-free up to . . . read more
P.S The new, Serious and more business conscious Ken Rockwell appears to have changed the wording, the context, heck, everything in his review of this camera. It is no longer "less responsive than his kids toys", and not worse of all Nikon DSLRs ever made. It (the Canon EOS 5D Mark II) is now better than any Nikon at almost everything, and overall, one of the best cameras ever made. Go figure. Quote of his old review, and our comment at the bottom of this post. . . . read more
First, not a review per se, but Roger Cicala at Rens Rentals takes the G1 X through the Imatest numbers, analyzes and compares the output to that of the Canon 7D, and comes up with the obvious.
Then there's a long video over at Serious Compacts where the G1X gets dissected and compared to Fujifilm X10 and Olympus . . . read more