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FACILITY: Ammonia factory
Plant: Hansa coke plant
Location: Dortmund, Germany
Photo taken: September 2004
Current status: unchanged
While my Canon S40 is broken (again, more on that later) and I haven't decided on what camera to buy next (more on that later, too), I am using a Canon G1 for the time being. If you want to start photography, this camera and its successors G2 and G3 are excellent choices, even though the G1 is a four years old model. It has a very fast lens, smooth zoom, spot meter, a fully rotable TFT, very clean screen overlays, unobtrusive menus, fully manual exposure control with very fine shutter and aperture steps, an infrared remote control and a flash hot shoe. What's much more important, image quality in terms of general impression, contrasts, colors, sharpness and, on longer exposures, noise is convincing. Color neutrality in manual white balance mode amazes me again and again (see example above).
Given that the G1 sells at eBay around 150...180 €, I wouldn't know what to recommend else with a similarly low financial threshold (expect you simply want to do snapshots). 50...80 € more buy you the G2 with selectable focus areas, evaluative metering, reduced chromatic aberrations, 15 instead of 8 seconds max exposure time and a histogram in replay mode (with the G1, experience has to tell you which contrast levels work and which won't). If you wan't to fork out even more money and get the G3, you have reached near-SLR level in photo quality. Don't go for the G5, as similar to the S50, its lens and sensor don't play together very well.
