Canon Powershot G5x Review: A Compact Camera Combining Top-notch Features

Canon’s new member of its PowerShot family G5 X is an advanced compact camera with the capabilities of a DSLR in a much smaller body.

The Canon PowerShot G5 X has a small body which offers a comfortable grip. We find this much better than other compacts we have tested till date. As the body has a small form factor, it can easily slip into your pocket, making you forget, that you are carrying a compact camera. This gets a rubberized grip on the both front and back, making holding the camera easier.

However, it has a compact body, still you can't miss control buttons as all the required control buttons are placed at right in front. It has the traditional mode dial over the left side allowing the exposure dial plenty of room on the right side.

Screen and EVF

The compact G5 X has a 3-inch 1.04-million dot vari-angle touch display meaning you can rotate this out and up/down to make shooting at odd angles. The rotatable touchscreen even lets you pick focus as well as can operate the camera up to an extent. It is equipped with EVF and here also Canon didn't compromise to putting it on the right or left side because of the compact size and fixed right in the middle. The EVF has a resolution of 2.36-million dots and an OLED-type panel enabling you to see punchy images.

Connectivity

The compact camera is packed with various connectivity features including Wi-Fi and NFC. These modern connectivities let you share your clicked images with your friends and family quickly and easily. As well as you can directly print your loved images using the wireless printer.

The camera comes with 3-stop ND filter which allows to click at wide open apertures even in bright conditions as this limits the light that gets through. Meaning no need to worry about the lighting conditions when shooting at f/1.8 just ensure to keep the filter on.

Performance

With the smart design, Canon managed to add every possible buttons and features in the compact body. The camera is capable enough to capture images with the speed of 5.9 fps when shooting JPEG-only without constant autofocus or 4.4fps with it which become possible by the DIGIC 6 processor. This also allows you to capture images in RAW making dynamic editing easier.

Sample Images

During the daylight shoot, its focus speed is quite good and fast, but in the low light conditions not much quick. You might struggle using the camera in low-light conditions, especially when you zoom to outer reach. It comes with various focus modes such as face detection and object tracking, however, it's not the perfect camera if you want to shoot action, but the manual focus may come handy.

Canon PowerShot G5 X has a 20.2-megapixel 1-inch sensor which is great to capture images with a good amount of colors and brightness. It produces good quality images with great details. But in video capturing, it disappointed us, as it doesn't support 4K. This can shoot videos at up to 1080p resolution with up to 60fps. The video quality is quite satisfactory at this resolution.

The compact size camera comes with a small battery that allows you to click about 230 shots when using screen/EVF while in the eco mode we were able to capture about 350 shots.