Middleweight Camera Championship

Canon G10

Of the three, this is the only camera you can put in a pocket—not the pocket of a polo shirt or a pair of hip-huggers, but at least of a coat or baggy jeans. It would also squeeze into a tiny handbag, though at 12 ounces, it adds a lot of weight.

The layout is superb. The right-hand grip slips into your fingers as if they had evolved for that purpose. Metal knobs on top let you quickly dial in the camera mode (automatic, manual, aperture priority, etc), the ISO light sensitivity and exposure compensation (to make photos a little brighter or darker than the camera’s brain normally would). A three-inch rear LCD displays the unbeatable L-shaped menu from Canon’s point and shoots. You scroll up down for categories such as white balance and image quality, then side-to-side to chose the setting, such as “daylight” or “cloudy” white balance and different levels of JPEG quality (or the option to shoot “RAW” and process the photos by hand on your computer).

If you want to trick out the camera, it has a hot shoe for mounting any of Canon’s SLR-grade flash units plus a mount around the built-in 5X zoom lens for adding attachments such as a telephoto lens. It’s also the only one of these three cameras that comes with an image-stabilizing lens and also the only that captures (standard-definition) video.

Images under bright light were brilliant. The G10 was the best at capturing difficult exposures—such as a building that was partly in bright sunlight and partly in shadow. The iContrast mode in its Digic 4 image processor ensured that no part of the photo was too dark or too light. It was close to the Olympus E-420 for overall color quality (the main weaknesses were in its slightly orangey reds and cyan-tinted blues).

Colors were also brilliant for indoor test photos of household objects when we used the built-in flash. Without flash, though, the G10’s tiny image sensor just can’t capture enough light. It’s ironic that the camera’s biggest control is the ISO dial that goes up to 1600. Canon could have saved space with a knob that stops at 400, the point beyond which photos become intolerably grainy.

Panasonic G1

The G1 offers the best options for framing photos. Its three-inch LCD tilts and swivels so that you can eyeball shots while holding the camera way over your head or down by your knees. You can even spin it around to line up a self-portrait. There’s no mirror to provide a periscope-like view through the lens. But Panasonic provides an electric viewfinder (EVF); basically a little LCD that you put your eye up to. The low resolution and color quality are disappointing, but the EVF provides one great advantage: It’s extremely bright even when you are shooting in a dark room. I found it invaluable when shooting with flash in a dark New York City club. The flash would provide enough light once I pressed the shutter, but I wouldn’t have been able to see what I was intending to photograph without the ultra-bright EVF. (Check these photos from a “fashion show” hosted by Fujifilm in which design school students made dresses on live models by cutting up and gluing together photographs.)