GE G1 Digital Camera Review

GE G1

Digital Camera Review

Mar 11, 2007 - By Richard Baguley
1.7 The digital camera market today is a place of razor-thin profit margins and competition more reminiscent of a street brawl than the gentlemanly rivalry we used to see. As such, we don’t see newcomers very often since most companies look at the entrenched hold that the big companies have on the camera market and decide to move into new markets where they are less likely to get a bloody nose. But newcomers do try their luck sometimes, and General Electric is giving it a go.   Actually, General Electric is only sort of giving it a go; the electrical and broadcasting conglomerate is licensing their brand to a new venture called General Imaging. The new company announced a range of 8 cameras at PMA. You can find out more details on their web site or by watching our video tour of the whole range here. Their launches are broken down into four product lines: the budget A series, the intermediate E series, the compact G series and the high-end X series.  We decided to take a closer look at the G1, the first of their new compact range. The G1 has a 7-megapixel image sensor and a 3x optical zoom lens. Pricing and availability has not yet been finalized so keep an eye on our news pages for details. We looked at a preproduction model of this new camera at the PMA show in Las Vegas.
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Auto Mode
When you set the control dial to the auto mode, the camera itself takes control over settings such as white balance and shutter speed. We weren’t able to test how good it was at making decisions at PMA, so we’ll reserve judgment on how good the auto mode is. The user can still set the image size and quality, though.
 
Movie Mode
The G1 records movies at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels or 320 x 240 pixels, both at a switchable frame rate of 30 or 15 frames per second. The files are saved as MPEG-4 files, which are pretty small but have high quality. The only limit on the length of movies is the amount of memory available.
 
Drive/Burst Mode
The G1 has a good selection of burst modes available: you can shoot continuously, shoot a burst of 5 images, shoot continuously and just preserve the last five images, or take images at a preset interval. The latter feature was not working on the preproduction unit that we looked at. General Imaging claims a shooting speed of 2.1 frames per second, with a maximum burst size of 5 images. That’s pretty average. It's enough to try and capture your son catching the football but not enough to capture a complete pass.
 
Playback Mode
The G1 is a little unusual in offering some basic editing capabilities which is not what we usually see on a point-and-shoot camera. The Playback mode menus has the following options:
 
Protect
One, All
Delete
One, All
DPOF
One, All, Reset
Text Display
On, Off
Trim
Dialog to trim image
Resize
Dialog to resize image
Rotate
Dialog to rotate image
Slide Show
Basic slide show features
Red-eye Removal
Dialog for red-eye removal
 
The editing tools are pretty basic, though. Images can be resized, rotated and trimmed, but there are no color correction or pixel editing tools. In addition, editing an image does not mean deleting the original. The camera will create a new image with the edited version.
 
Custom Image Presets
13 scene modes are provided on the G1: Sport, Child, Indoor, Flowers, Snow, Beach, Firework, Snow, Museum, Landscape, Night Portrait and Night Landscape. There is also a portrait mode on the mode dial.
 
Design/Layout Page 5 of 11 Control Options
General Electric G1 First Impressions Review Navigation
 
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