GE G1

Reviewed June 2007

Image Quality

The GE G1 is one of a group of cameras GE is introducing to the market. While the GE name is well-known, up to now it has been associated with products as diverse as home appliances and consumer electronics, right up to jet engines, but not photography.

In some ways the G1 is reminiscent of a number of other compact digital cameras, and almost appears to be an amalgam of different ideas and designs that we have seen before.

In use, the G1, albeit very easy to slide into a pocket and carry around, takes some time to get accustomed to. The placement of the zoom control, on the right end of the camera's top, tends to get in the way of the shutter release, and accidentally changing the focal length towards the wide end can be caused just by brushing up against the control while reaching for the shutter release.

Similarly, the lens position in the upper corner means that the user has to be conscious of the position of the left hand's fingers while holding the camera.

The G1 is designed to be a simple to operate point and shoot, and as such, it is not particularly fast, either to start or to operate, but it has no disturbing shutter lag once focus is achieved. All of its shooting modes are automatic and, with the exception of the Manual mode, most camera settings are under the control of the camera.

The G1 includes all the "standard" scene modes, and adds a couple that are not yet common but which are becoming more popular: an Electronic Stabilization mode, and an in-camera stitching Panorama mode.

The Electronic stabilization mode boosts the sensitivity up to 1600 ISO, allowing the camera to select a faster shutter speed, but regrettably, causing a major increase in noise that seriously limits the practicality of the mode.

Indeed, when the ISO sensitivity of the G1 stays in the low range — below 200 ISO — noise is usually not a serious issue. At 80 or 100 ISO, noise, when it can be found, is limited to shadow areas and only starts to become noticeable if the image is brightened. The 200 and, even more so, the 400 ISO levels clearly contain noise, making their usefulness somewhat limited. The 800 and 1600 ISO levels however contain so much noise that images look more like watercolours than photographs.

The other mode, Panorama, stitches three images captured by the camera — either flowing from right to left or left to right — into a single image. The resulting panoramic image can be seen on the monitor and imported into a computer, but none of the three images from which it is composed are retained. The quality of the panorama itself, while it is fun to play with, is not as good as what can be had with dedicated software, and the seams between images can be quite noticeable.

The default metering pattern is an averaging pattern that evaluates segments of the scene and establishes the exposure parameters based on the readings.

Generally, the metering results in well-exposed images, although there seems to be a slight bias towards the highlights, as when the subject contains a mix of bright and dark areas, the images tend to retain detail in the highlights more than in the shadows.

The G1 provides 3 levels of JPEG compression to save images. The highest image quality is identified as BQ (Best Quality), but it applies a lossy compression ratio that falls in the range of 8:1 to 10:1, depending on the subject. At this compression level, some of the finer details tend to become slightly blurred, an effect that is easily noticeable when the photos are seen at 100% scale on a monitor.

The strong compression used on the G1 tends to lower the image sharpness overall, imparting complex images with a slightly soft focus look uniformly across the frame.

Photos captured with the camera also reveal a slight amount of barrel distortion at the wide end of the zoom, most noticeably when the subject is near, and a slight amount of pincushion distortion at the telephoto end. Chromatic aberration, however was not significant with the camera tested here.

Prints made from the G1's images are sharp and detailed up to 5x7 inches. Printed out to larger sizes such as 8 x 10 and up, shadow or colour noise or even the reduced sharpness caused by the compression, can become visible in the print unless the image is selected carefully.

While the G1 will satisfy the needs of many point and shoot users, it does face some stiff competition from companies whose name is more readily associated with photography than GE. The G1 is a debut camera, and its descendants may well develop into more impressive and feature-rich cameras over time. But at this time, however, the list prices currently indicated by some retailers may make it a tough sell amongst well-informed camera buyers.