G2 vs G3, some thoughts

[GeertDD]

Hi all,
I recently swiched from a G2 to a G3, I broke the G2 :(

My first impressions of the G3 are mixed.

On some points it's a clear improvement over the G2:
The focusing is very accurate, almost as good as my EOS30, but it's very, very slow.
Image processing is much faster than the G2, especially noticable when shooting RAW
Button lay-out is much more simillar to the SLR's

But on some point the G3 disappoints me a bit. My first impression of the lens is that it is inferieur to the G2 lens. Canon seems to have sacrificed the image quality for the longer zoom range. I noticed much more C.A. than on the G2 and worse, I see a lot of corner softness. The softness is not noticeble at the ends of the zoomrange, but at 10-15 mm and f-stops under 5,6 I see large blurred areas, the worst is the upper left corner. Could this be a fault in my particular lens, or do others see the same problem. I know that corner softness was mentioned in the G3 review at imaging-rescources.com, but it's described as a very slight problem.

My second question is why the RAW files of the G3 are different from the G2. If it's the unprocessed data of the chip, and both use the same chip, shouldn't the files be the same. But the G2 software can't handle G3 files, and G3 RAW files are much larger (4mb vs 2,7mb)

Thanks for any thoughts on my questions,
Geert.

(Maybe I'm just too obsessed with pixel quality, and should go out shooting some pics instead ;) )

[marcel wouters]

Geert,
I really don't know if the G2 lens was better than the G3!
What i read from reviews is that the G3 lens is of good quality and also that the image was softer than the G2 (they reduce the sharpening).
Now the G3 is a 12 bits (per color) camera the G2 only 10 bits this should explain partly the image size difference!

[GeertDD]

Thank you for your comments, I had not thought of the 10bit vs 12bit , that explains the file-size issue.

The C.A. problems depend so much on the light circumstances that only a direct comparrison could give a real answere. My assumption was based on a few backlit shots of the G3, and I searched my G2 shots for something similar. The G3 lens is at least a whole lot better than some lenses of other compagnies :)

The corner softness is something I still worry about. I definetly do not see it in my G2 shots, I've chequed a lot of shots with full open lens and lots of corner detail like foliage, and if the G2 focussed right, the image is sharp to the corner. My G3 definetly is not, especially at focal lengths between 10-15 mm. I'll try to look at some full-size examples on the net to find out if my G3 is worse than the average G3.