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Canon GX7 III First Look

This is the brand new Canon Powershot G7X III, a premium compact camera with a 1 inch, 20MP sensor and where the G7X II was a popular vlogging camera, a lot of what Canon have updated and added focuses on vlogging and improving that side of things with the mark iii.

The Powershot G7X III is very similar to the G7X II visually. It very much keeps the same design but it does have a deeper grip making it quite a bit more comfortable to shoot with.

Image Quality

That 1 inch sensor puts it into the premium category of compact cameras and the 20MP resolution gives you nice, detailed images; while that is the same resolution as the mark ii, Canon have said there are improvements in picture quality and low light performance as well.

The lens on the front is a 24-100mm (4.2x zoom) which makes it quite versatile for different types of shooting whether you want to shoot wide for a landscape at 24mm or punch in for a portrait or a close up.

It’s also a pretty bright lens at f1.8 to 2.8 helping with lowlight and allowing you to combine that with the longer focal lengths to get some nice blur to the background of your images, some nice out of focus areas.

The mark iii also has the Digic 8 processor making it quite a bit faster which allows it to use the new RAW burst shooting at 30fps.

Video

The main area of improvement is in the video side of things. Vloggers have certainly been at the heart of this camera and Canon have really made this a very enticing option.

So you’ve got 4K at up to 30fps; nothing crazy there but definitely an important upgrade. There’s also no crop at 4K and it actually looks really sharp and crisp.

It’ll also shoot 1080p at up to 120fps giving you nice slow motion but one of the biggest things for me is the built in image stabilisation. It is so helpful for shooting handheld video, allowing you to get movement in your shots and of course it helps with vlogging, especially if you’re walking about while shooting. It’ll also help for low light stills and shooting with a longer focal length.

There are two other things which make this a really impressive camera for video, a built in ND filter which makes it much easier to set your settings how you want them to be, even in bright sunlight and a built in mic jack which is super rare on a compact camera like this.

Following on from the vlogger side of things, it’s also got YouTube livestream functionality built in which is a pretty cool feature.

While I was shooting with it, I was using the face detect for the autofocus which worked well. The continuous autofocus is maybe a little slow but nothing that ever really caused me any issues.

Build and Feel

In terms of the build of the camera, as I mentioned before, it’s got that deeper grip so it’s more comfortable to hold, otherwise you’ve got the usual buttons and dials as well as the back dial and front lens ring making manual control very easy. The tilting screen on the back tilts up and down and actually tilts all the way over the camera so you can see yourself, again with vlogging in mind.

It’s also a touch screen and while that is nothing particularly special in itself, it makes controlling the camera very intuitive, I was able to set my settings using the touch screen and if you were coming from a mobile phone, you’d be right at home here.

Canon have very much doubled down on the vlogging side of this camera and as far as compacts go, this is a great setup for video.

You can see the full spec, description and price of the camera here.

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By Park Cameras on 11/07/2019