Revisiting the Canon G1X in 2026

This is the second post in a short series, revisiting my old Point & Shoot cameras. This post looks at my G1X:

The G1X is showing its age stylistically: but, as we know, what goes around comes around. It entered the market in 2012 with the following specs:

• Resolution: 14.3 Megapixels
• Sensor Size: 1.5-inch type (18.7 x 14.0 mm)
• Processor: DIGIC 5
• ISO Range: 100 to 12,800
• Focal Length: 4x optical zoom, 15.1 – 60.4 mm (28–112 mm equivalent in 35mm format)
• Aperture Range: f/2.8 (Wide) – f/5.8 (Telephoto)

One of the reasons the G1X remains a great camera, other than its large sensor, is its ability to run CHDK and thus my (in-camera) Lua Landscape Bracketing Script.

As a landscape photographer I'm not that interested in how many frames a second the camera can capture, ie  in this case up to 4.5 fps (high-speed burst HQ mode up to 6 frames), so the camera remains relevant for me. 

The main use case I am interested in is a deep focus high dynamic range scenes: and the LB Script is specifically designed for this and the demonstration test below shows this. 

Unlike the bracketing schema used by some photographers, eg where you would take an exposure bracket set at each focus step, ending up with a lot of images, the LB Script takes all the focus brackets at the manually set exposure for the foreground, ignoring the sky exposure, then, at infinity the script automatically captures an ETTR sky exposure, which can then be blended in with the focus stacked image.

As an example, the following shows the finished, post processed, image after LBS captured six focus brackets and one sky bracket. 

After ingesting the images into Lightroom and carrying out the base adjustments, eg NR etc, I post processed the images with the following workflow:

• Adjust the sky exposure capture to match the focus brackets, ie to help with exposure blending
• Export the focus brackets to Photoshop and process them into a single, focus blended, image
• Pop back to LR and export the sky capture to Ps
• In Ps blend the sky bracket with the flattened focus bracket image
• Return to Lr and finish off toning etc

As can be seen, the resultant image is a deep focus capture of a high dynamic scene, with all the brackets automatically captured with a 14 year old P&S camera with a very reasonably sized sensor.

BTW you can pick up an excellent condition, secondhand, G1X for about GBP400 in the UK.

As usual I welcome any comments on this post or any of my post.