One of the problems when touring on a tandem with your young
children is major fatigue. I’m not talking about being tired at the end of a
long day. That goes without saying. When touring, I like taking pictures while
riding. While the absolute quality isn’t the best, I find that there’s a quality
you get from cycling photos while riding that you just can’t get when you’re
stopped. Plus, when you don’t have to stop, you can more strictly adhere to the
adage: “If it looks good, shoot it. If it looks better, shoot it again!” But
when you’re working at maximum capacity all the time, your cognitive IQ loses
its first digit and your ability to pull out the camera, take a picture, shoot,
and put it all in your jersey pocket goes to zero. On a climb, which was previously
my favorite time to shoot pictures, I frequently found that it was impossible to shoot at
all!
Nevertheless, any doubt that I had that the G7X2 was worth
its weight disappeared when we stayed on the Stelvio. The photos produced were
superlative, even with the minimal processing I was able to do on the
smartphone, and the quality outshines what any smartphone camera I’ve seen do.
We even use the selfie flip-screen a lot more often than I would have expected, though frequently the shot would be out of focused, so it's a lot less useful than you might think.
Several weaknesses came to light when using the camera on a
bicycle tour. First of all, the mode and exposure compensation dials weren’t
stiff enough, and were often tweaked sometimes subtly sometimes not while
pulling the camera out of the jersey pocket (most of the time, Lightroom or Photo Mate R3 would make the corrections automatically). Secondly, I’m not at all a fan of
using the phone as GPS locator. It would have been one thing if the app was
robust enough for a “set it and forget it” setting: I could have simply turned
on GPS logging the entire trip and then sync’d the location over the phone
every so often. But the app would stop logging every time you sync’d locations,
it would stop logging every time you reboot the phone. It’s a real shame that
both Sony and Canon opted not to have this feature built directly into their cameras.
Sync’ing the camera wirelessly to the phone enabled
downloads of photos directly from the camera into the phone for processing, which saved the weight of carrying dongles for reading the SD card. At
random, the photos appeared to be converted from RAW to JPG during the
transfer, limiting what processing I could do on the phone, which was already
very limited in the first place. I ended up having to do a ton of repeated work at home when in front of the big
screen.
I think if I were to design the ideal touring camera, I
would basically go for just a fixed 24mm lens, just P,A,T, and M modes with
dials that have high stiffness. I would also go for built-in GPS, wireless
downloading, and the articulated screen which is great for close/far landscapes
and selfies. With that, the camera would be significantly lighter while
providing more functionality. But maybe that’s not ambitious enough. My guess
is that what I really want is a smart phone with a 1" sensor that
shoots RAW and allows for manual control of images rather than the crappy tiny
sensors that currently fit in smartphones. Unfortunately, I’m probably the only
person in the world who would buy such a device, so I’m not going to hold my
breath for such an implementation. Fuji has just announced the XF10, which describes everything I wanted (including an even bigger APS-C sensor) above except for GPS, 24mm lens, GPS, and articulated screen. So close!
Despite
the flaws, the Canon G7X MK II is a great camera and worth the weight and price
to carry along on a bike tour. Stop shooting with your cell phone camera if you're going to use a 4K monitor. Recommended.
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