This first shot was taken with the G10 under bright light at its lowest 80 ISO sensitivity and therefore represents ideal conditions. The G10’s 28mm equivalent coverage has captured a noticeably larger field of view than the G9 could at 35mm. Interestingly the G10 applies more sharpening by default than the G9, so the fine detail captured here jumps out. Like the G9, the shadows aren’t quite as clean as a DSLR, but most would be very happy with the G10 at 80 ISO. Its images under these conditions can look great.

Landscape: 8.92MB, Program, 1/800, f4, ISO 100, 6.1-30.5mm at 6.1mm (equivalent to 28mm)

						Another shot taken under bright light with the lens zoomed-out to 28mm, but now with the sensitivity increased to 100 ISO. This shot was taken at a very low angle and while a flip-out monitor would have been preferable, the G10’s screen remained sufficiently visible for framing. Once again the sharp crops are packed with fine detail, and while pixel peepers may notice a marginal increase in noise, it’s still nothing to worry about. There’s also only slight fringing and softness in the far corners.

Landscape: 6.95MB, Program, 1/1600, f4, ISO 200, 6.1-30.5mm at 16mm (equivalent to 73mm)

Viewed at 100%, the crops reveal a visible increase in noise across shadows or flat areas of colour. There’s still lots of detail in there, but it’s not as crisp as at 80 or 100 ISO.

The G10’s new Servo AF kept the boat in sharp focus, although with just 1.3fps or 0.7fps with continuous AF, it’s hardly an action camera.

The G10’s face detection locked-on, although even with the longest focal length and maximum aperture, the depth of field remains quite large.

As with the previous sample, the crops are fairly detailed, but exhibit textures through noise, in flat or shadow areas. This in turn has softened the image overall compared to lower sensitivities.

This shot was taken from around 2cm and shows you can still enjoy decent macro images, although there’s noticeable barrel distortion, along with softening and fringing as you approach the corners. Better instead to nudge back slightly and maybe zoom in a little.

The camera’s IS system effectively eliminated any camera shake at 1/8.

The boost in sensitivity has seen a visible increase in noise textures, again particularly in shadows or flat areas of colour.

If you’re looking at our other galleries though, it’s arguably no worse than either the LX3 or G9 at 400 ISO, and the far left crop from the magazine cover reveals a high degree of fine detail.

Shooting in RAW and applying your own noise reduction later makes the G10’s 400 ISO quite usable.

As you’d expect, there’s a significant increase in noise levels here, although again it’s similar to the 100% views from the LX3 and G9 under roughly the same conditions if you check their galleries.

The good news is there’s still a fair degree of fine detail present here, which will also has the potential to clean-up better with third party noise reduction on RAW data.

The colours are less saturated as a whole, and viewing at 100% reveals undesirable noise and processing artefacts.

As such 1600 ISO is a step too far for the G10 and should only be used for small online images or emergency situations.

Again though it’s no worse than the Lumix LX3, which isn’t bad considering its 50% higher pixel count.