**A Review of the Canon G5X Camera**

The Canon G5X camera is a solid device that excels in many areas, but like any product, it has its limitations and quirks. As I used this camera to film my latest project with John, I was pleased to find that it performed well in many ways.

**Audio Quality: A Mixed Bag**

One of the things I noticed about the G5X is its audio capabilities. It has two microphones, which provide stereo audio, but due to the design of the camera and the nature of microphone pickup patterns, there are some limitations to this feature. For example, when filming in noisy environments like downtown Los Angeles, where John and I were shooting, the lack of a directional microphone like a shotgun mic made it difficult to capture high-quality audio. The microphones on the G5X are good, but they're not ideal for capturing detailed sound in loud or distracting environments.

**The Importance of an Audio Input**

One feature that Canon seems to be missing from the G5X is an audio input. This would allow users to connect external microphones and improve the camera's audio capabilities. I wish Canon had included this feature, as it would have been a game-changer for capturing high-quality sound in noisy environments or when using shotgun mics. Instead, users are limited to the built-in microphones, which can be sufficient but not ideal.

**Intervalometer: A Convenient Feature**

One feature that is available on the G5X is an intervalometer, which allows users to take multiple shots at set intervals. This is a convenient feature for time-lapse photography and would greatly increase the usability of this camera if it were built into the operating system rather than requiring an external unit. I wish Canon would consider including this feature as a standard part of the camera.

**Clicky Dial: A Minor Irritation**

Another minor issue I had with the G5X is its clicky dial, which surrounds the lens and allows users to adjust settings like aperture or shutter speed. While the dial is convenient for some users, it can be annoying when using the camera in quiet environments, as the clicks of the dial can be picked up by the microphone and drive you nuts.

**Comparison to Other Cameras**

When comparing the G5X to other cameras like the Sony, it's clear that Canon has done an excellent job with this device. The G5X has a touchscreen, which allows users to focus on subjects quickly and easily. However, the Sony also has 4K video capabilities and higher frame rates, which may be important for some users. Ultimately, the choice between these cameras will depend on individual needs and preferences.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, the Canon G5X camera is a solid device that excels in many areas. While it has its limitations, including poor audio quality and a lack of an audio input, I would still recommend this camera to anyone in the market for a compact point-and-shoot camera. With some minor complaints and suggestions for improvement, I am planning on using this camera a lot more in the future and will continue to monitor its performance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enand this video I want to take a look at the Canon g5x now you're probably already thinking to yourself my God Ted what is your deal with compact cameras well having compact cameras is a real essential part of how I work I obviously do these videos and I do a lot of them so having something that is small and portable I don't have to Lug around a DSLR um being able to have image stabilization that's pretty good um you know things like we know this last weekend when I went to Los Angeles and the last two videos I did where I interviewed John free on the street or I bumped into Alexi Toreno at Classic photographs LA and to be able to just kind of do video impromptu like that and have a camera that I can flip back and forth with doing Stills with as well is really important to me because it reduces the amount of stuff I have to carry around and it actually enables me to do more with it and so for that reason I've been really excited about compact cameras cuz I think in the last 5 years we've gotten to a point where the image quality and what you're able to do with them it's pretty good and it's going to be interesting to see what comes up I don't think we have a perfect camera yet but I do want to take a look at the Canon g5x CU there's a lot of good things that I think you can say about this the Canon g5x is one of five cameras that Canon offers right now that feature 1-in sensors the other two that I'm most familiar with that I can compare this to are the g7x and the g9x the g9x I did a review on a few weeks ago and it's actually a very nice point- and shoot camera it fits in your pocket it's really small but I think the crippling Factor on that camera is the lens I think it's poorly designed the g5x on the other hand that we're looking at today I think features a much better lens design and it features a variable aperture lens it's 1.8 on the wide end and then goes down to 2.8 on the long end and it is in 35mm equivalent basically a 24 to 100 mm lens so it does cover a nice range the camera is capable of shooting 20 megapixel Stills and you can shoot 1080p video at frame rates of 24 frames a second 30 frames a second and 60 frames a second now the interesting thing to me is that this camera the native frame rate on here for video is actually 24 frames a second that may not be a big deal to a lot of people but for me it is because I like to give the videos that I make a more cinematic look to them and there are several factors that go into that but one of them is being able to shoot at what is the American Standard movie frame rate which is 24 frames a second so having a native frame rate of 24 is quite an excellent thing to have in this camera I want to talk a little bit about the camera design here and I've heard several Canon reps say that this was basically a compact that was designed to be a very comfortable switch for people who are used to shooting on a DSLR now I think you get into a little bit weird territory there because there's an implication that this camera performs like a DSLR and it does not um if you're shooting fast-moving subjects so if you're shooting sports or if you're shooting kids or combination thereof which a lot of people do it does not have the same feel that you have with a DSLR and this has nothing to do with with image quality or features on the camera just has to deal with actual photography and there's a little bit of a lag with what you're seeing with the LCD screen and the electronic viewfinder and that moment where you're going to push the shutter or you're going to try fire off a bunch of images to get that that decisive moment of when you're shooting your picture it's hard to do with this because the screen goes dark and it just slows down and it's just too cumbersome the whole thing with a DSLR as opposed to mirrorless or compact cameras or anything else is that you have a mirror and you're actually seeing what is happening there's no lag and the camera stays out of your way in that regard now having said that that is not a gripe about the image quality of the g5x or anything of that nature the g5x is excellent but it's going to be tough to shoot in fast-moving subject situations if you're shooting portraits or you're shooting Architectural Interiors or exteriors or anything like that image quality is fabulous and I think in that regard it does kind of perform at least on the level that you would expect from a DSLR because you're not expecting that speed now in terms of design and functionality on here I do like the fact that there are knobs on this camera and that is really nice because I come from you know when I was a kid I shot 35 mm and that's how you operated a camera and to this day having lots of menu systems and cameras again affects that speed and slows you down so I do like having knobs you do have a knob on the front and when you're in manual mode this will affect the shutter speed and so you make your adjustments from there and then you use the collar around the lens and this actually changes the aperture the g5x does feature an electronic viewfinder and is a 2.36 million Dot evf and the image quality is pretty nice on there and it is easy to use assuming you're not shooting something that's moving very quickly and you also have a tiltable LCD screen on the back and there is a sensor on the evf that will sense whether you're looking through it or not and that's how it switches back and forth between the two the LCD screen is touch sensitive which is very useful particularly for autofocus when I'm doing video work and I just want to focus on my subject I just tap there on the screen and the focus locks in and pretty much stays intact the autofocus on here is excellent and it's really nice being able to pair that up with a touchscreen it just makes working easily particularly doing video work the LCD screen does flip out and it is tiltable and this is extremely useful if you're doing videos or you're recording yourself like I do if you're doing any kind of vlogging or anything like that because it's nice to have a monitor now it's interesting because this LCD flips out to the side whereas the g7x flips over the top and I wasn't sure I was going to like this because it does add to the width of the camera but in actually using this I really do like it and I found it very useful and I actually like it better than the screen that flips up the camera does have a built-in flash which is accessible just by lifting on the top of the camera and the Flash in here is okay it'll do in a pinch it's not the greatest thing in the world you can't bounce it for instance but what is nice is you do have a hot shoe on the top and this is compatible with all the Canon speed lights and I suppose it would look relatively ridiculous to put a gigantic flash on a very small camera but you can indeed do that if that's how you want to work on the top left of the camera you have your mode selection dial and on the right hand side you have the power on and off the shutter release mixed with a little toggle for zooming and then finally your exposure compensation dial on the right hand side on the back of the camera you have all of your control buttons that are going to get to your menu settings your quick settings what is displayed your image playback and you also have the record button that starts and stops video now I don't know what the problem is because pretty much every camera right now that's out regardless of manufacturer has this issue this record button to start and stop video is extremely hard to find and get to especially if you were filming yourself or you're doing an interview and you're not looking right at it I wish this was more prominent like the shutter button to take still photographs in fact I wish it were programmable so I could just assign that to the shutter button to start and stop video as I mentioned earlier the last two videos that I did on my trip to Los Angeles last week were entirely filmed on the g5x and there's a couple observations that I want to make that speak very highly to this camera first of all image stabilization is about the best I've ever used on any camera and it's particularly useful when you have a compact camera and you're doing something like an interview with John free out on the street or if you bump into Alexi Toreno and you you want to do an interview and you're just basically holding this thing up and pointing it at your subject and shooting image stabilization is excellent another feature that's interesting that they've combined into here and I don't know that you'd want to have it on all the time but it for a lot of stuff that I'm doing I used it it's an auto leveling feature and what it does is it actually senses how the camera is being tilted and it will try to level it out a little bit and so that working in conjunction with with the image stabilization make this a really usable run and gun camera and that's really important when you're doing field workor like that and just the nature of this camera being that it's so small in size it makes it very susceptible to a lot of motion and being able to have image stabilization that spot on is very useful another nice thing about this camera is it does have a built-in neutral density filter and this is particularly useful in a number of situations if you're shooting Stills and you're outside and you want to really shallow depth of field you want to be able to shoot wide open turning on the neutral density filter will help you with that and I also use it a lot with video Work particularly when I'm using a shutter speed of around 50 frames a second and I want to be able to help achieve that I can use the neutral density filter in that case the battery life on this camera is rated at 210 shots and I have not done any scientific testing to this whatsoever I carry a second battery with me and about all I can tell you is when I was in Los Angeles I was pretty much shooting all day and by the end of the day the battery was low I never had to change it I did have a spare with me but I did not notice anything significant about it draining too quickly or not really getting any performance out of the camera I was perfectly happy with the battery life on this thing now I want to talk for just a second about how I set this camera up to do video work and there's a really specific look that I usually go for which does require post- production but I want a more film-like look and so what I will do is actually do some color grading in a program called Da Vinci resolve and now the Canon g5x does not have a log profile on it like the Sony RX100 markv does and I've talked about log profiles before but basically it's a way of recording recording very flatl looking footage that doesn't look that great coming off the camera but allows you an enormous amount of flexibility in adjusting contrast and adjusting color and saturation and that's all done in post-production now the video that you get straight off the camera in standard picture profile mode looks fantastic on here now as I mentioned there is no log mode if you do want to go the extra mile to do that work but there is a little trick that I do with the camera here and what you want to do is you want to go into your color profile settings here and there are several different options that you have here for different color looks that you can get and what I do is I bump this all the way over and I create a custom profile setting now when you go in here and actually edit what you're getting from your custom profile it's pretty standard I turn the contrast all the way down to zero I turn the saturation all the way down to zero and I actually turn the sharpness down to zero as well this camera is very sharp and some of that is probably the lens some of that is the way the image processor works and I have notice that in video sometimes you do get a little bit of a mo effect if you have you know tight patterns that are designed it's a weird effect that can be distracting sometimes in your footage so I want to be able to control my sharpness in post- production as well so I'll turn all those down to zero you also have selections for red green and blue but I leave all those set in the middle and I'm experimenting with this still but that's what I've been using and that's what I used on all the Los Angeles footage and it seems to work out pretty well it gives you a flat picture in the end that doesn't look that great coming off the camera but again it's about allowing that flexibility in post- production to get exactly the look that you want so as you can tell I'm very impressed with the g5x I do however think that there are some improvements that Canon needs to make on this camera and if they do a Mark I or something like that and you know Canon in recent years have gotten a lot of flak for being less Innovative than a company like Sony if you look at the RX100 mark IV for instance it has more features especially for videos so things like 4K it can record 4K in little 4minute segments it can do higher speed frame rates so if you want to overcrank and do things with slow motion you can do those but I've noticed though as much as I love the RX100 markv that Sony does put those up at a cost cuz you're really driving the performance uh capabilities of the camera so for instance if you're recording 4K video well you have to stop every 4 minutes by about the third time you start a video the camera starts to overheat and I don't really have a problem with what C Canon is doing with features in this camera I think 1080p video is fine I'm glad that they offered you more frame rates in this you're allowed to do 24p now which you couldn't do in the g7x and so I don't think that that's necessarily the problem I think what Canon does it does very well um when I shoot with my Canon gear it's really utilitarian it may not have all the Frills that something else has but it does perform and it does what it's supposed to do now having said that I do want to point out a few things on here the audio on here um it has two stereo well has two microphone so you get stereo audio in the end which is fine but due to the nature of camera design on here and this is not so much you know something that they can fix I understand but microphones have different pickup patterns and there's different way way they're designed and so for instance if you go see a band at a concert the old sm58 mics that the singer has it has a really tight pickup pattern so it's going to be most sensitive to things that are close to the microphone when you do video a lot of times I'll use a shotgun microphone so this is something that is going to have a very narrow pickup pattern that it's going to use to try to filter out less of the noise that you have around you now when I use this camera out on the street when I was filming John free we were in downtown Los Angeles and here's the deal it is very noisy down there there's a lot of construction there's a lot of traffic there's a lot of people and so it's just a really noisy environment and so the ability to have a shotgun mic and pair it up with this would be excellent now it does have a hot shoe on the top so I could put a road video mic or something on there there is no audio input so I guess this is a long way of saying Canon please put an audio input on this camera if you go to the side and you see what your inputs are you've got USB connectivity HDMI output and then you do have a jack for an intervalometer now what an intervalometer does is it's an external unit if you've ever seen these that allow you the ability to do time-lapse photography so it's a unit that you plug into that and you say okay give me 300 shots and take them 10 seconds apart you hit go and it sits there and it tells the camera to take an image every 10 seconds I don't know why this can't be built into the operating system um and I wish Canon would do that I don't want to see it as an app with an app store that you have to download just build it into the thing the amount of time-lapse photography that I do compared to the amount of video is much less and so it would in greatly increase the usability of this camera to be able to have an audio input you were really left with having to just use the mics on the camera having said that the microphones are good on here it's just that if you're in a room where there's a lot of noise or you need to have that directional component you just can't do it with this camera and so for that reason it's it's a little bit crippling I was able to do the video I was able to do that with John but it would have been even better if I were able to use a shotgun mic with this so that is one problem that I do have with the uh the g5x another thing that's a little bit of a minor issue but is still an issue and this is the same on all of the Canon compacts and point and shoots is this dial that they have around the lens that you're going to use to dial in certain settings it's a clicky wheel and when I turn this and click it if you're shooting video and you're trying to change your aperture on the fly or something like that you hear the click in the microphone and drives me nuts I I don't know why Canon can't just make that smooth I think they've made this kind of one of their things to differentiate them but it really is annoying and I wish they would just make that smooth other than those Minor Details I do think this is a very solid camera and I think Canon have done an excellent job with the g5x and you know if you're in the market for something like this and you're comparing it with something like the Sony I mean sure the Sony has more features like 4K video capabilities or those higher frame rates that we talked about but at the same time the Sony is missing the touchscreen so being able to shoot video and focus on the Fly just by touching on the subject is something that you don't have in the Sony which really kind of makes that an issue and the Canon what it does it does very well I just have some minor complaints on it but I really do recommend this camera and I'm planning on using it a lot more in the future so anyway if you guys enjoyed this video please remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest videos that we do here until the next video I'll see you guys then later\n"