G11 as a travel cam in India - dslr left at home

[vtpachyderm]

Last month, my family and I took a trip to India to visit my parents. My kids (2.5 and 1) had never been there, and my parents had not met my youngest boy. I have a Nikon D90, which I use as my primary cam. However, air travel with two small kids meant that hand luggage was at a premium so the d90 wasn't coming with. My brother who lives in the US picked up a G11 for me, and gave it to me when we met in India. I was a little worried as here I was with a new camera that I had never used and was going to take pictures with it of my kids. Needless to say, the camera performed brilliantly, and surprised for a P&S (1300+ pictures attest to that).

I've made a little Gallery of some pictures from the trip here.

The good
- the level of control on the camera was nice. Exp comp dial, ISO dial, and the scroll wheel meant you didn't have to dive into menus.
- size was just right - big enough to hold ok, but will still fit into cargo pant pockets. Construction felt solid.
- battery life was surprisingly good - lasted on average for about 300 shots.
- raw files were nice to process
- high ISO was surprisingly good for a small sensor cam.
- swivel screen is a nice thing to have
- optical viewfinder while small, was nice to have
- 2 custom settings on the dial which you could program as you liked.

The bad
- placement of some buttons meant my thumb kept hitting buttons initially until I figured out how to hold it.
- shot to shot time a little slow.
- startup time a little slow
- exposure behaviour takes a little getting used to.
- and the big one - image quality settings change if you go to one of the scene modes or auto. This particularly irked me as sometimes the scene modes do a great job, but they tend to default to jpeg (I shoot raw all the time because I can).

Sorry for the long post, but I just wanted to share my experiences with the camera as it worked very well for a travel cam, and I can highly recommend it.