G1X - Accurate Focus with the Smaller Retical.

I've been very impressed with the Auto Focus accuracy on the G1X. Those of you who already have one may by now have discovered this for themselves but the G1X has a very accurate focus ability. If you have kept your camera in default more, you may find that the larger targeting retical is less suitable to closeup subjects where you might want to focus on an eye or a specific detail within the frame. I suspect that you'll also find that the larger retical would not have allowed me to shoot some of the shots below. I always set my cameras to the smaller zone but I'd like to hear from anyone who seen an advantage in the larger zone.

But from Day One, I altered the default settings on my camera to reduce the focusing retical size from large to small as I have found previously that Powershot cameras do a better job when focusing on Macro subjects with the smaller retical.

I noticed how consistently accurate the Autofocus has been when shooting what would otherwise have been tough subjects.

The only time I had trouble locking onto a subject was once when shooting towards a bright street light which was perhaps forgivable and avoidable. When using my favored s95, for example, the s95 is very easily confused when I want to photograph something close to the lens. The same occurs with my G11 which will often favor the background instead of the foreground. Terribly frustrating sometimes.

It was something I noticed rather straight away... that the G1X was allowing me to shoot closeup shots that other Powerhots sometimes found tricky. Especially when it came to the finer-than-hair strands of spiders web. For the shot below, I was able to select and photograph everything I wanted... from various sections of the web to the various parts of the spider. The picture I chose to keep was one where the tips of the spider's legs were coming in contact with the web in the center of the frame and I focused on the web rather than the spider, which is just out of focus here.

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I conducted two experiments recently, one of which was just yesterday. It's easy to see that the Camera can focus well on Macro subject so perhaps that was the strong point... hence, I decided to try a shot with maximum Zoom engaged.

I selected Maximum Zoom and proceeded to take two shots of a street lamp and of the moon behind it, recomposing the shot after locking focus. Though I only had to move the target retical slightly, the camera was surprisingly accurate - even with the two subjects so close to one another.

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I can also recall that earlier on, when shooting my wife playing a game of pool that the G1X was able to accurately select the difference between the tip of the Pool Cue and the Ball, even under low, artificial light and even with the Macro engaged and a 500D Closeup Filter on the end of the lens.