360Photography

Introduction

Despite the improvements made in smartphones, 1″ sensor compacts remain one of the best ways of getting great images and some decent zoom reach in a pocketable form.

Both Canon and Sony have just updated their pocket-sized models, using the latest Stacked CMOS technology: Canon with the Powershot G5 X II and Powershot G7 X III, and Sony with the Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 VII.

They’re rather different, each offering a different balance of size, price, zoom range and lens brightness. We’ve just updated our buying guide to compare the new trio to their existing peers, but we also wanted to see how they stack up against one another.

As always, it depends what you want to use them for, so we’re going to take a look at a series of popular types of photography to see how well-suited these latest cameras are.

Lenses

One of the biggest distinctions between the cameras concerns their lenses. At 24-200mm equiv, the Sony by far offers the greatest reach and the most flexibility. However, the F2.8-4.5 maximum aperture range is considerably less bright than the F1.8-2.8 lenses fitted to the two Canons. The graph above shows how those apertures compare as you zoom in (a lower number is better).

Interestingly, the G5 X II and G7 X III use different lenses, with the G5 X II offering a more impressive 24-120mm equivalent range, which offers a lot of the Sony’s capability while maintaining the low light and shallow depth-of-field benefits of its brighter aperture.

The G7 X III uses the same lens as its predecessor, and it offers the shortest range of this trio (though still longer than the RX100 V(A) or Panasonic LX100 II). From our experience, the lens in the G7 X III is probably the weakest at wide angle settings, as well.

We’ll take a much closer look at how these different lenses impact different types of photography later on.

Features

From a quick look at the headline specifications, all three cameras will look pretty similar: they’re all 20MP cameras based around Stacked CMOS 1″-type sensors. All three are also capable of shooting 4K video. But the differences start to stack up (no pun intended) the more you dig into things.

The biggest differences spring from the RX100 VII having a newer sensor that allows 20 frame per second shooting with no viewfinder blackout (the live view is interrupted only by an on-screen indication that photos are being taken).

There are differences too in the way the three cameras capture their 4K footage: the Sony applies a small (1.08x) crop but uses every pixel within that region, creating highly detailed oversampled footage. The Canons use the full widths of their sensors but don’t appear to use all their pixels, and the footage is significantly less detailed as a result.

The other major difference is in terms of autofocus. The RX100 VII has an AF system derived from the company’s pro-sports-oriented a9 camera, which tracks subjects and switches to face or eye detection as appropriate. By comparison, neither the G5 X II or G7 X III are able to track subjects while continuously shooting. This difference will prove significant across a range of different types of shooting.

Travel

The longer zoom range of the RX100 VII makes it the obvious choice for travel photography. Backed with excellent AF, 20 fps shooting with no blackout and impressive video specs, it’s ready and able to shoot just about anything you might encounter on your travels.

The G5 X II has perhaps the most flexible lens, though. It gives up some reach at the long end, but its faster maximum aperture means it’s able to stay at a lower ISO and hence offer better image quality as the light levels fall. The inclusion of ND filters in the lenses of both Canon modes mean you can more readily utilize their shallow depth-of-field capabilities, as well as helping in video.

The G5 X II is also quicker to respond to user input than the Sony, despite the RX100 VII’s processing muscle. If your photographic style is more about taking control and changing the settings, the Canon is likely to give a more engaging experience.

All three cameras can be charged over USB but, whereas the Sony uses a traditional Micro-B connector and will accept a charge from just about anything, the two Canons are more picky about the power source for their USB-C connectors. Newer, higher power chargers and power banks will work, though.

With its shorter lens, lack of viewfinder and not very impressive image quality at its wide-angle settings, the G7 X III is the weakest travel option here, even though it’s a rather good camera.

Family and moments

As with travel shooting, the RX100 VII’s longer zoom range makes it a more flexible ‘whatever happens next’ camera, but the Canon G5 X II isn’t far behind in this regard.

The Sony’s biggest advantage, though, is the ease and effectiveness of its autofocus system. It’s uncannily good at recognizing and focusing on people you point it at. It’s also very good at maintaining its focus on your intended subject, rather than leaping off to another person the moment your subject turns away.

The RX100 VII is, in many respects, the best family camera ever made

The Canon pair’s brighter lenses give them a huge advantage when it comes to shooting indoors, but their autofocus isn’t nearly as fast or dependable as the Sony, which undercuts this benefit. You will get cleaner, less noisy images in any situation where your subject doesn’t move too much or too fast. They’re also unable to shoot bursts with continuous face tracking, which could be a pain point for parents photographing their families.

The Canons have ND filters built in, which means you can more easily shoot smooth-looking video footage, thanks to the use of appropriate shutter speeds. They offer fewer specialist tools for getting the most out of the video, and again can’t match the Sony in terms of simplicity and dependability of focus.

While the Canons are both pretty capable, the RX100 VII is, in many respects, the best family camera ever made, just in terms of how well it can cope with the unpredictability of everyday life.

Lifestyle and people

The shorter but brighter lenses of the Canons make it easier to get shallow depth-of-field than the Sony, though it’s worth noting that the G7 X III’s lens isn’t very good at the wide-angle end. As well as giving an arty effect to close-ups and slightly more compelling portraits, the wide maximum aperture maintains the image quality better as light levels fall.

The trio also have tiny built-in flashes to provide some fill-in light even in bright conditions

Again, though, the RX100 VII’s autofocus makes it quicker and simpler to reliably get people in focus. The Canons can track faces in continuous AF mode but not while shooting bursts, and though their Face + Tracking mode works similarly to Sony’s ‘Wide’ AF area, the Sony is generally faster to respond. All three cameras have Bluetooth systems to stay connected to a smartphone, which makes it faster to connect and send images over Wi-Fi.

The trio also have tiny built-in flashes. They’re limited in range but, because all three cameras have super-fast lens shutters, the mini strobes can be used to provide some fill-in flash, even in bright conditions. The flashes are all bounce-able, meaning you can tilt them back with your finger and fire them at the ceiling, which will give you a softer look than if you keep the pointed straight at your subject.

Landscape

All three cameras are suitably pocketable that they’re easy to take with you, wherever it is you want to shoot.

The Sony has a number of significant advantages over the Canons: the biggest is that its lens is better at wide-angle, while the longer zoom also gives move compositional flexibility (though the G5 X II’s 120mm equivalent long end shouldn’t be especially restrictive). The Sony also offers considerably longer battery life, though a rating of under 400 shots per charge should encourage you to think about having a means to recharge it if you’re planning to spend any length of time out in the wilds. This is likely to be most pressing if you want to take advantage of its intervalometer mode.

We’ve been impressed by the sweep panorama modes on all three cameras, which makes it very easy to casually capture extra-wide landscapes in high detail.

Like the Sony, the G5 X II has a built-in viewfinder, which certainly helps when shooting outdoors in bright light. The clicking front dials and dedicated exposure comp dials are likely to make them a fraction easier to operate with gloves or cold hands, too. Both Canons offer in-camera Raw conversion if you want to fine-tune your images before you get back to a computer.

Since all three cameras are based around similar sensors, there’s no significant difference in Raw performance between the three. An unintended benefit of the Sony, though, is that you can use HLG and zebra highlight warnings to give an indication of the sensor clipping point, providing an on-the-fly hack for optimally exposing your Raw files.

Video

To begin, all three cameras are able to shoot 4K video and offer fairly robust stabilization while doing it.

The Sony’s footage comes from a slight crop of the sensor, but is much more detailed than that from the Canon. It also offers a much stronger set of support features. Zebra warnings help you set exposure and the ‘HLG’ color mode (even in the 8-bit form used here) captures more dynamic range and gives you much better processing flexibility than the Canons can offer.

The RX100 VII has a mic socket but no ND filter, which means adding unofficial third-party accessories if you want to shoot video at sensible shutter speeds in good light. Both Canon cameras have built-in ND filters that can be engaged at the press of a button, meaning you don’t have to resort to this sort of workaround.

The Canons are smart enough to keep separate exposure settings for video and stills shooting (which the Sony doesn’t, unless you set up Memory Recall), making it quicker to switch back and forth between stills and video. But the Sony lets you define separate Fn menus and custom buttons for stills and video shooting, which is a benefit if you’re really trying to take control of what the camera’s doing.

Then, of course, there’s autofocus. You’ll need to engage ‘Touch Tracking’ in the menus to access the Sony’s touch-to-track capability but the results are really impressive if you do: it will stick pretty reliably to your subject and will refocus quickly and smoothly with essentially no user input (so long as you don’t stop down too much, again encouraging the purchase of an ND filter). The Canons can’t quite match that: though their face detection is pretty reliable, they use a contrast-detect only system, which can result in visible hunting and being slow to catch up to changing subjects.

Photographers’ compact

This category is a bit of an outlier. Basically, if you’re already a reasonably experienced photographer that perhaps has a kit built around an interchangeable lens camera, which of these compacts would be best if you wanted to go out with a camera in your pocket, instead of in your backpack?

For almost every type of photography, we’ve found Sony’s easy-to-use and effective autofocus gives it a clear benefit over the Canon models. The speed and processing power needed to deliver this level of performance explains much of the price difference between the cameras.

Which of these cameras is best if you want a camera in your pocket instead of your backpack?

However, while many types of shooting benefit from it, not all photography needs action-ready AF performance. Lots of photographers have got great results out of compact cameras with significantly slower AF than is available today. So, while AF performance gives the Sony the edge for a lot of photography, it’s not the end of the story.

In our shooting, we found many of us preferred shooting with the G5X II. It wasn’t necessarily as good at ‘getting the shot’ as the Sony was, but it was a more agreeable companion to shoot with.

Part of this is down to the brighter lens: there were plenty of situations in which we were happy to give up some of the extra reach the Sony offers in return for a little more control over depth-of-field and the image quality benefit of being able to get more light to the sensor.

But another aspect of this was the simplicity of the Canons. A clicking dial on the front of the camera lends itself well to controlling settings such as aperture value, and a dedicated exposure compensation dial is much nicer to work with than the fiddly dials on the back of all three cameras. Then there’s the responsiveness of the Canons. It’s an odd charge to level at a camera with the obvious processing power of the RX100 VII, but it’s simply not as quick to respond to user inputs.

The net effect is that, partly because they have fewer features, the Canons end up being more straightforward to just go out and shoot with.

Conclusion

The message that shone through when considering this article is just how many types of photography benefit from how well the Sony RX100 VII’s autofocus works. Which isn’t to say that the Canon system is terrible, but it just can’t compete with the speed, simplicity and reliability of the latest Sony implementation.

However, the processing power and R&D costs that underpin that capability don’t come cheap, which means the Canon pair are both significantly less expensive. There’s a lot to like about both Canons but everything we’ve seen of the G5 X II suggests it has a better lens compared to the G7 X III, as well as a more useful zoom range. Add onto this the benefits of an electronic viewfinder (albeit one that’s a bit more fiddly than the one on the RX100 VII) and the G5 X II is would be our pick of the Canon models.

If you don’t need action-ready autofocus and the very best 4K, or are willing to give these up for the benefits of a wider aperture, the G5 X II’s is an excellent camera. But, even with the degree of customization the Sony needs, the RX100 VII is a genuine leap forwards for compact cameras, in a way that will benefit a range of photographic pursuits.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)