Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- User Rating: 
Summary for Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- ALMOST 5 STARS
Notes on Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- After having about 35 years of accumulated Canon (film) equipment taken from my truck I had a choice: stay with film, or go digital. I started with a digital Canon because I'm familiar with the way they think a camera should work, I'm sure a Nikon would have been as good a choice, but I started with Canon. And worked my way up through a series of cameras to the Pro 1. If you have never used their `L' series glass, you will be astonished at how fast, crisp, clean, and clear it is. The 28-200 zoom is nice. You will get a lot from this camera, but pushing 8 megapixels to a large `professional' sized print is difficult. Everything everyone has said is pretty much true.
The:
** Good: L series glass, OPTICAL zoom, good range in zoom, STRONG flash, exceptionally nice smaller prints. Will take long - tripod needed -shots in the multiple seconds range. can be used point and shoot or full manual.
** Average: Battery life is average so have a spare (or two), and I've been told many, many times that I DO need to stick with Canon Batteries by people I respect - so ditch the 10 for $100 non Canon batteries and stick with Canon. I've been given many reasons when I have my yearly cleaning and tune up of my cameras and lenses (only because I treat them rough and use them in hostile environments (like the Great Basins and Ranges in the Summer heat and dust and the Winter cold and grit and wet). The best reason I've been given is that non-canon batteries may 1) lose their re-charge life significantly faster because they are often made of re-cycled materials that have not been cleaned up very well, and probably most important, they tend to leak if left too long without use or charge. This will destroy your camera right then and there - and I have noticed that one bunch of `money saving' batteries DID start to leak (first sign is the copper beginning to turn a greenish brown, before the green really shows up) after only about 3 weeks of charge-discharge cycles. Didn't save much on those batteries, AND I needed to carry 5 or 6 with one in the charger all the time to do a full day shoot. So now I cowboy up for name brand batteries. I don't like it, but people who know say I need to stay with Canon batteries, and all they do is repair optical equipment, they sell ONLY service on things from microscopes to cameras, no tangible products of any kind, and that's about as neutral as you'll get. It doesn't seem it would matter, but it does.
** Bad: slow to boot up, hard or impossible to auto-focus in low light, WILL freeze sometimes in low light or low battery, if you accidentally remove the card while it's on, you'll erase the entire card, poor quality large prints, flash often TOO powerful and I have to `bounce' it off a home-made white card double bounce contraption and it almost always needs to `bounce' for inside diffusion and even distribution of light. But a simple 3x5 card will do that nicely, but side angle bounce flash is nearly impossible -- sometimes you can use a bent 3x5 card, but it's very awkward and often the card will show up in the frame unless you pay very close attention to it, and focusing and holding a card is ALMOST impossible. Might as well forget wild-life photography, by the time you pull up your camera, turn it on, wait for it to boot, and then get a focus, that Osprey is now on the other side of the canyon, or that deer is most likely behind a tree or rock or has taken it's four bounds and is now just a dot in the zoom lens. And that Bald Eagle on the fence post about 50 feet away is now in Utah or Oregon at 20,000 feet. The way you counter this problem is to keep the camera on and not let it go to sleep -- draining your batteries every second. Count birds out, large mammals as maybes, and landscapes as certainties. Portraits are as good as you are in normal light. I don't shoot portraits, so this is a neutral point for me.
** EXCEPTIONAL!!!! I got distracted by my dogs while shooting a sunset scene of a Nevada Mountain Range and had it mounted by one of those `spider' pods to the brush guard on my old Toyota Land Cruiser. I got in and drove away and at about 40-45 MPH hit a small pot hole on the dirt road and heard a funny sound and looked out my passenger-side mirror and saw the black box of the camera rolling across the dirt. Dang!
When I got back to the camera there was a very small roundish crack in the top where it had first hit hard pan, then bounced across some gravel and into some sand where it came to rest in an old bitter brush bush. IF I'd sealed it right away it would have stayed, but I didn't and in about a month the place where it had cracked fell off, showing some of the electrical parts inside, and I sealed this with some plastic and glue. When I sent it off for it's cleaning a bit early - they said other than the normal amount of grit and dust they'd normally find, there was no other damage to the camera, lens or focusing mechanism. Wow. Well built is an understatement.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
1)....I AM ASTOUNDED AT HOW WELL BUILT AND SOLID THIS CAMERA IS!
2)....If you want to REALLY learn photography, this is the camera to buy. It'll let you be lazy and use it as a point and shoot, but you can also move to manual settings, AND it has a macro setting so you get close-up and personal -- and with the L series glass you the best of both worlds: point-and-shoot to almost-true-pro with super fast glass (this means you can hand-hold in lower light and not need a flash). Every shot is free until you print it. So take the shot, the only way to learn is to take the shot -- the worst that will happen is you'll throw it away. And I have to admit that seeing your image captured right away will improve your ability as a photographer faster than any film camera will, I probably learned as much in the first month of owning this camera as I had in the previous 35 years - but I also read the manual. AND, this camera will teach you all of the little things you need to know so you can `trick' the brain of digital cameras in general.
3)....I've just bought a Canon 5D with a set of lenses and while I have now learned my way through the beginnings of digital photography starting with simple and moving to the top of the `amateur' cameras, I can now move to a mid-real pro camera and know what I need and what I don't. But I would not hesitate to carry this as a `backup' or use it in places that I'd not want to take my several thousand dollar camera and lenses or lug 5-10-25 pounds of glass. AND only if I wanted prints that were smaller than 11x17. At 11x17" you are pushing the camera to, and maybe just a tad beyond it's maximum resolution limit.
*****FINAL SCORE: 4.70 STARS*****
Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- User Rating: Summary for Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- unique combination of features in the single device
Notes on Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- To start, I would like to note that I had purchased this camera in 2004 and took over 70,000 images so far with it. Back those days nothing better existed on the market. Still no one beats the unique combination of features this camera provides: small and light-weight, L-lens with 7x zoom (and as the result - amazing quality of images), video recording, flipping Life-view screen, durable aluminum body, top LCD, etc. It took Canon over 4 years to integrate some (but not all) of the Pro1 features into the latest DSLR. Sure, this camera is useless for night-photography but other then that - this single unique device can satisfy any and all needs as a walk-around camera delivering uncompromising image quality, something you can get only by investing at least 3-5K in to DSLR.
Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- User Rating: Summary for Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- Unacceptable....
Notes on Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- Recently, I inherited this camera at my job, to use for conferences and job fairs, and I've been forced to use my personal $250 Nikon to get decent pictures. The only good news is that I didn't pay for this Canon. Not having image stabilization really hurts this camera when used in low light situations - all shots are blurry. Fiddling with aperture and other settings helps only slightly. I've studied the manual cover to cover, fiddled with more settings, and no go. Of course no one believes me - that a camera that costs this much could take such terrible pictures, (it must be Operator Error!), so I let others snap some shots - then they see the light. Don't buy this camera!!
Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- User Rating: Summary for Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- Powershot Pro 1
Notes on Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- Canon made a masterpiece at that time, it is a very well thought and designed camera. Though it may look outdated now, but even now no one will match its potential. All in one camera, I am not ready to leave it at any cost.
Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- User Rating: Summary for Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- good for non-action pics with good light, bad for everything else
Notes on Canon PowerShot Pro 1 8MP Digital Camera ...- I've used this camera pretty heavily for about a year, mostly for travelling. I've used it for candids, landscapes, action, and wildlife. Previously, my photo experience has been with Canon point and shoot digicams and Nikon film slrs. It's a bit unfair reviewing this now that it's almost 3-yr old technology, but I noticed that people are still selling this camera for over $1000 on this site.
For a "pro" camera, it has a large number of critical flaws (listed in order of how much they bug me):
1) slow focusing esp in low light. This renders the camera almost useless for action, and difficult to use for wildlife and even candids, where capturing the moment is everything. The focusing may be faster in continous mode, but then its always focusing and you have to keep the subject centered-- I like to not be looking in the viewfinder unless I'm about to take a picture. I don't own a canon accesory flash so I don't know if their focusing aids help. The manual focusing on the EVF display is too slow and cumbersome to use routinely.
2) slow shutter lag. Even on manual focus, with problem 1 taken out of the picture, there is a bit too much delay to consistently capture the shot I'm looking for.
3) Dust gets _inside_ the lens. I have read that this is a problem with this camera. Canon was good enough to rectify this when I sent it in, and they even said they sealed the lens to prevent the problem from happening. My brother has the same camera and this happened within 2 weeks of a trip to Europe-- not especially dusty. Unfortunately his is out of warranty so I don't know if they will do the same.
4)) hi noise at ISO 200 or 400. I think with commercially available noise reduction software this is a bit repairable. To be fair, the grain of most 400 speed color film can be as unattractive as the noise of this sensor at ISO 400. Since digital SLR's with less grain at ISO 1600 are now available, I don't think anyone should be selling this camera for $1000.
5) bayonet mount on front of lens scratches filters when used with included 58mm adapter. My $50 polarizer is now dedicated to use with this camera since with other lenses the scratches are in the optical axis.
6) built in flash pics are harsh. This is a problem with any built-in flash on any camera. Again I have no canon accessory flash to compare, so I can't really comment on this as a negative for a pro camera.
On the plus side, the camera does some things amazingly well:
1) super macro is quite impressive, even though 8mp or raw isn't possible.
2) the regular macro works pretty well.
3) it's a pretty compact solution for a 28-200 lens equivalent. The equivalent SLR is a lot bigger, though maybe not much heavier. I don't know how the lens quality of the pro 1 "L" lens compares to the non-L SLR lenses. You definitely won't find an affordable f2.8 SLR zoom lens for an attractive price (not a Canon at least). The lens is pretty good-- little distortion except at 28mm and little chromatic aberration. A hint of vignetting at 28mm as well.
4) It's ultra quiet. When I mute all the sounds, it makes only barely perceptible aperature noises.
5) the rotating lcd allows for true WYSIWYG composition from different angles, allowing for some stealthy shots and also good for macro stuff.
6) really great depth of field (I haven't objectively tested this so I don't know if the 7.2mm objective actually has better depth of field than an effective 28mm on an slr)
Taking into account it's strengths and weaknesses, I use the camera for travelling and taking landscapes when I don't want to carry around a big slr for the super wides. It's smaller and quieter than an slr and better for the surreptious candids, esp with the rotatable LCD. It'd probably be a good macro-specific camera but I haven't used the macro flash. For most uses, it can't possibly be worth it if fast-handling, low noise SLR with equivalent lens is available for the same cost or cheaper. I got it as a gift before lightweight travelling so it was great for that, but I'm looking to buy an SLR now.
