Another Survivor

Ultra compact cameras have taken a back seat with smartphones taking over their role as your always-available portable camera.

- Sujith Gopinath

However, premium or professional compact cameras, with 1-inch sensors and fast and better optical zoom lenses, still manage to keep their relevance and ride parallel to the smartphones. The Canon G5X Mark II is one such.

Design and Build Quality

The G5X Mark II has a rugged build quality with the exteriors constructed out of metal and engineering plastic. The camera provides a premium feel with a matte-finish coating along with rubber finish for the front and sides.

The device has a protruding grip and a well-defined thumb rest. A control ring around the lens assembly allows you to change the aperture and other parameters. The top of the camera includes the pop-up flash as well as the pop-up EVF. The camera has a metal tripod receptacle.

Key Features

The 20.1 megapixel G5X Mark II uses a 1.0-inch Type Stacked CMOS sensor along with a Digic 8 processor. The camera features a 24–120 mm equivalent f/1.8–2.8 lens, providing 5x optical zoom. The lens features Optical Image Stabilisation. The G5X Mark II focusses as close as 5 cm and provides focus modes such as One Shot AF, Servo AF and Manual Focus. It features 31 AF points. Still images are captured at maximum dimensions of 5472 x 3648 pixels in Raw or JPEG format including a Compressed Raw option. Movies are recorded at up to 4K (3840 x 2160) quality with 25 fps frame rate in MP4 format. In burst mode, the camera can shoot still images at up to 30 frames per second in Raw format.