G7X II and wide angle

I'm looking for a good 1" compact P&S, so I've been investigating about the G7X II. With a much brighter and longer lens than peers, it looks like a no-brainer choice. But many mention soft corners at wide angle. I find difficult to form a definitive opinion about that, given the obvious sample variation.

But to make my ideas a little more clear, I tried to play with RAW files downloaded from DPR sample galleries. My investigations are reported here : https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/5636131559/albums/gx7-ii-wide-angle

Conclusion first :

• IMO, the G7X II indeed cannot be as sharp as peers at wide angle if you really need a rectilinear projection
• But it is actually a very good news : it's a feature, not a bug !!!

Indeed, the G7X lens is actually much wider that the claimed FF eq 24mm. It is more like a 21mm lens ! And with sharp corners if you give up on distorsion correction. The latter point is not that bad IMHO since depending on the subject, streched corners often appear as unnatural. For instance, I prefer natural landscape without lens correction (and sharp corners in addition).

IMO and given my own usage, the G7X II will be a better companion for hiking than peerslike RX100II+, which is not obvius at a first glance

Please note that you'll need a raw converter like Capture One Pro (or DxO I think) to unleash the full potential of the G7X lens. With LR, I don't thnink that the following is possible.

Now the details ...

A RAW file gets imported in Capture One Pro : the light part correspond to the default manufacturer crop and corrections. The crop is important and the corners get streched a lot.

Here is the picture with the default manufacturer profile : the framing is the same as in OOC JPEG. It corresponds to a 24mm lens projecting on a FF sensor. With a 100% export in C1P, the resulting image is 16.8 MPix. After, resizing + corner stretching, if one wants to produce a 20Mpix, the borders cannot be ultra sharp !!

There is however much left to recover in the file : there is more information in the RAW file than in the OOC JPEG. Indeed, he resulting image has actually a significantly wider angle of view (perhaps like 21mm on a FF sensor ?). Of course, the borders beeing streched and fully displayed, they are softer.

When disabling the lens profile (so not distortion correction) and with no crop, you get the full 20Mpix of the sensor. There is no stretching here, but a heavy vignetting.

Let's crop to remove the vignetting part. The file is now 17.3Mpix and since the borders are not streched anymore, they are much sharper. But the distortion is heavy.

With another picture, you can see the OOC framing...

... and the much wider but still streched version ...

... and the much more detailed, wide and unstreched version !In landscape, I find that UWA can be useful, and that distotion is often not a problem : when there are not many straight lines, I find more natural not to strech borders.

For a matter of comparison, here is an RX100 V import. You'll notice that there is much less distortion and crop, but also much less angle of view to recover !

... and when exporting the RX100 V RAW file, you get a 20Mpix JPEG, to be compared with the 17.8Mpix and heavily streched G7X.

Interesting study. Thanks for that.

Thanks for that interesting analysis. I'm going to go through some of my wide angle G7X RAW files and see what they look like with reduced, or no, lens geometry correction. You may have changed the whole way I use this camera!

I've had my recent submissions into Alamy with my G7X Mark ii all signed off. That was with all focal ranges and iso 125-800. Then again I have images on that stock site since 2003 with scanned EOS 300 film and EOS 300D jpgs resized. 🤔😉