Last week I mentioned that my new Canon G7X arrived and I shared my first thoughts on the camera, having not even switched it on. This past weekend I charged the battery and inserted a memory card. Whilst knew I wasn’t going to get out to for serious photography I was determined to shoot a few test frames. This is how it went.
My first shots with the camera were whilst stood in my back garden. I shot a few reference frames and examined them on the back of the camera at maximum magnification. This revealed what I call Jaggies (the individual pixels of the image). When I see Jaggies such as this it means either the camera is not rendering a smooth image from the RAW file or the lens is exceptional. Importing the images to Lightroom later would allow me to see the truth.
Whilst making these test shots I also made a sequence at different ISO settings, starting with the base ISO of 125 and going up to the maximum 12,800. The light levels were very poor due to an impending thunder storm, which resulted in a shutter speed of 1/8”. Very pleasingly I found that I was able to produce consistently steady shots even with such slow shutter speeds. This would suggest the image stabilisation in the G7X is quite good.
I had high hopes for the image quality but on reviewing the test shots on the computer later I was quickly disappointed. The images were steady but the lens just appeared soft and incapable of rendering a sharp image. The ISO tests did perform better and showed the noise to be well controlled. The noise at higher ISO settings also reminded me a little of strong film grain.
The next day I took the camera out when I when shopping. The image of the canal that you see above was taken on the way to the Supermarket. This time I had set the camera to shoot RAW +JPEG which allowed me to zoom in to the image and assess the quality a little better on the camera. Again the images just didn’t seem to be as crisp as I had wanted but the Jaggies were gone. It was then, looking through the settings, I noticed that the camera had been set to a focus stacking mode. This is a neat little feature that allows you to take multiple shots with the focus point being moved automatically between each (you can later merge them in software to a single image). When I turned this feature off the next images seemed to snap into focus on the camera screen.
Reviewing the images later on the computer I could see they were of a higher quality than I initially thought. I won’t say that the lens is exceptional but it does produce a solid performance, although the corners at 24mm display some distortion. Two other points I noticed are:
1. The colour handling is very natural and I like it a lot.
2. The touch screen selection for the focus point is excellent. This is a feature that I first came across on the Panasonic GX1 and I loved it. The Canon implementation is almost identical to the Panasonic and it makes the camera very nice to use.
In summary, this is a pleasing start to using the G7X. I’m now waiting on the Lensmate Filter Adapter to arrive from the US so that I can begin using filters and testing some landscape work.
The Lightweight Photographer 
How post-processed was that image? It looks like it was vibranced and sharpened considerably
There is some post processing but not as much as your question might suggest. Mainly it was clarity and contrast (in the mid tones) with a radial filter to lighten the boat a little. I suspect the sharpening effect is the result of the contrast adjustment and downsampling using Bicubic Sharper in Photoshop.