Canon PowerShot G16 review: Canon ekes out more speed for the G series

As a news announcement, Canon's PowerShot G16 enthusiast compact was a bit of a yawner: basically, it gains Wi-Fi and 1080/60p video over its predecessor, the G15. As a camera, though, the G series is slowly improving. Given that it was once one of the cameras that defined the enthusiast category it's sad to see it slip compared with competitors. Like the G15, the G16 has excellent image quality at low ISO sensitivities, but its performance is significantly improved -- still not the fastest option in its class, but no longer the slug it was. Its feature set continues to lag comparatively, but overall the camera remains a nice option for manual-control devotees who don't want to schlep around a dSLR and who still find compact interchangeable-lens cameras a bit too large.

7.8

Canon PowerShot G16

The Good

The <b>Canon PowerShot G16</b> produces very good photos in bright light, and the fast lens, optical viewfinder, and relatively streamlined design make it nice to use. Plus, it finally delivers solid continuous shooting.

The Bad

A mediocre Wi-Fi implementation, no articulated LCD, and lack of manual controls while shooting video are among the ways in which the G16 lags behind the competition. And other cameras deliver better photos in low light.

The Bottom Line

While the Canon PowerShot G16 is better than the G15 and remains a nice enthusiast compact, its low-light photo quality disappoints for the money.

Image quality
The G16's photo quality is about the same as the G15's, though looking back at that review I think it might have gained an extra stop of usability through tweaks in the JPEG processing. While very good for a small-sensor camera, photo quality still doesn't quite match that of the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100. For JPEGs, images look good up through ISO 400, then artifacts begin to become quite apparent. While there's no great dynamic range or unsuppressed noise in the raw files, with some adjustments you can produce shots as high as ISO 1600 by processing them to better handle the tradeoffs of noise and sharpness. That said, I couldn't get decent prints out of my ISO 1600 shots.

Canon PowerShot G16 photo samples

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It does have the same excellent lens as the G15, fast, bright, and reasonably sharp, albeit with some barrel distortion even at the 50mm-equivalent focal length. At its widest the lens stops down to f2.8 at about 96mm-equivalent, which is more than acceptable. The flip side, however, is that it can't narrow to more than f8, which had me enabling the ND filter more than usual in bright light.

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ISO 100

ISO 400

ISO 1600

Like many competitors, the G15 clips highlights, though you can tweak your settings for more optimal exposures. The color rendering is pretty good, though daylight white balance is a little cool and the images a little contrasty. Unfortunately, it still doesn't offer an AdobeRGB setting, nor are there dynamic range correction and color controls when shooting in raw or raw+JPEG.

I was less enthralled with the video this go-round, though it's still fine for typical casual shooting. Canon's upped the top frame rate to 1080/60p and added 1080/30p, but dropped 1080/24p. It still lacks manual controls, and while the video looks saturated there's a lot of aliasing (jaggies) and ringing (haloing) on edges that becomes more noticeable as you zoom in (though it uses optical, not digital, zoom).

Performance
As advertised, the G16 is faster than the G15 in many, but not all, ways. It's faster on startup, taking 1.6 seconds to power on, focus, and shoot. But my test results show its shot lag -- the time needed to focus and shoot -- is slower. It's pretty fast in good light at 0.3 second, but in dim light rose from 0.6 second to 0.9 second. The rest looks significantly better, and in line with Canon's claims of about 50 percent improvement. Time between two JPEG shots runs about 0.7 second, but two sequential raw shots runs 1.4 seconds; time between JPEGs with flash enabled rises to about 2.9 seconds. While these times are a welcome improvement over the G15, they're still pretty slow.

One of the most noticeable performance bumps comes in continuous shooting, just about 10 frames per second with fixed focus and a still-respectable 5.8fps with continous autofocus. The optical viewfinder, while small, still works effectively in burst situations, with surprisingly accurate framing. However, I did experience the odd drift in continuous autofocus that you see in the three shots above -- it didn't just miss and lock on something else, it would simply stop focusing for a few shots, then drift back in, then out again, in a pretty easy situation. And the continued drawback of the direct-view optical viewfinder is that there's no AF overlay so you're pretty much just pointin' and prayin'.

Design and features
The camera design and layout are nearly identical to its predecessor with only a few tweaks. The grip remains relatively shallow but serviceable, and the dial on it feels a little awkward to operate without scrunching your hand.

The mode dial and exposure compensation dials are stacked but offset from each other on the top right; an aesthetically interesting and functionally streamlined design. The tiny popup flash isn't bad, but I wish it could tilt back to bounce.

The mode dial has the usual PASM, auto, and scene modes, movie mode, and two custom settings slots, plus Movie Digest (2-to-4-second clips that are automatically strung together with stills) and Creative Filters modes. The latter are the rather typical set you see everywhere, and not particularly interesting implementations. There's a slow-motion option for video, but it produces tiny videos.

On the back there's an inset movie record button that sits too flush with the thumb rest, making it difficult to engage quickly. The AE lock, AF area, ISO sensitivity, and menu buttons surround the navigation dial, which contains a dedicated manual focus button, macro, flash, and display, as well as the Func Set button for pulling up frequently used shooting settings. There's also the shortcut button for one user-defined direct-access control, moved to the top right of the back. The sad victim: the dedicated metering button.

Overall, with the exception of the aforementioned record button, and the annoying operation of the quick-settings menu -- you have to press the Func button to dismiss it, you can't just press another button -- I like the design of the camera and find it delivers a pretty streamlined shooting experience. For the most part, the interface operates cleanly; you can quickly dive down to more detailed adjustments straight from the quick-settings menu.

The camera also adds three night scene modes: Star Nightscape (long exposure), Star Trails, and Star Time Lapse Movie. Unfortunately, these aren't very testable in Manhattan. Canon does seem to have relaxed the G15's constraint of only being able to use ISO 80 for exposures longer than 1 second.

Canon still lags behind almost everyone with its mobile app. Though the G16's big add is Wi-Fi, the Canon app only supports image transfers and phone-based geotagging, not remote shooting. Plus it's pretty clunky to use.

Conclusion
If you're sensitive to price and don't care about Wi-Fi or speed, I'd look for price drops on the G15. And if you want better photo quality and have the budget, I'd probably suggest paying a little more for the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 -- or finding an inexpensive ILC paired with a small lens for maximum compactness. But as long as you stay in the light, the G16 is still a fine choice.

Shooting speed (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Time to first shot

Raw shot-to-shot time

Typical shot-to-shot time

Shutter lag (dim)

Shutter lag (typical)

Canon PowerShot G15

2.3

2.6

1.9

0.6

0.2

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100

2.1

0.2

0.2

0.3

0.3

Canon PowerShot G16

1.6

1.4

0.7

0.9

0.3

Nikon Coolpix P7700

1.8

3.2

1.5

1.1

0.4

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 II

2.5

0.2

0.1

0.5

0.4

Canon PowerShot G1 X

1.9

3.2

2.4

0.7

0.4

Fujifilm X20

1.5

0.7

0.7

0.4

0.4