This is How You Give Your Competition the Future

It has been but three days, and I have already discovered the annoying things about my new Canon Powershot V1 pocket camera.

I got it because my Sony ZV1M2 had a disgraceful problem: it was made for video, but when you actually shoot video, it overheats in a few minutes and shuts down without telling you. It fails, and miserably so, at the main task for which it was created. It’s like an air conditioner that only works on cold days, or an SUV you can only drive 50 miles at a time.

I can’t understand why Sony would do something this stupid. Are they unable to do better? They’ve made a lot of outstanding products. It’s hard to believe they let this one slip by.

It’s great if you like shooting three-minute videos, and you don’t shoot them less than 10 minutes apart.

Maybe I should have just bought a good selfie stick and external mikes.

The Canon is often described as a point-and-shoot camera, although that is not true. It has a pretty good optical zoom, and if you have to zoom, you’re doing more than pointing and shooting. It has a manual mode, so you can pick your shutter speed and ISO. It has all kinds of features. It has an APS-C sensor, which is pretty big for a compact camera. It’s not a 1970 Kodak Instamatic. Stay within its limitations, learn to edit, and you can produce very, very nice pictures with it.

It does not overheat. It has a fan. Video is not a problem.

I’ve already produced some photos so good, I am shocked. It’s not a pro-grade full-frame camera with a $15,000 lens, but what it can do, it can do very well.

So what’s my beef? I’ll tell you. Canon has rigged things up so it’s hard to edit raw photos that come from this camera.

Canon has a reputation for being a jerk. Sony will let just about anyone make a lens for its cameras, but Canon, perhaps hoping to equal Apple’s disastrous performance in the 1990’s, makes people use Canon lenses for its latest mount. That’s just idiotic. It also has a proprietary raw format. On top of that, it does not cooperate very well with outfits that make editing software.

Bottom line: I pretty much have to use Canon software to edit this camera’s raw CR3 files. I have Affinity. I have Elements. I have Topaz Photo AI. I had to download a fourth religion…I mean program…to fix this camera’s CR3’s without a ton of hassle.

I never saw this coming. I don’t know anything about photo software. I just figured any software would edit any photo. Not so.

Let’s talk Affinity. It’s a real program. It’s not a joke, even though it’s free. I can edit Sony raw photos all day with it. It’s nice. It’s intuitive. It is useless for my Canon’s files.

When CR3 and JPG files come out of this camera, they look just fine. When I try to edit a CR3 in Affinity or Elements, I get what is called “vignetting,” which really should be called “dark corners.” That way, no one would have to look up “vignetting.” The corners are black. Not dark. Black.

Everyone always says it’s easy to fix vignetting with software. Well…it’s not. The software has to like the format. If not, you can’t fix the corners.

Affinity relies on lens profiles to fix vignetting. Canon, being the unhelpful company it is, does not provide profiles. Helpful consumers create them, and they upload them to a site called Lensfun. That’s where Affinity gets its profiles. There is no profile for the V1. Maybe there will be some day; it’s a new model. If you look at the other Powershot profiles at Lensfun, what do you see? The site says they don’t fix vignetting. So even if someone creates a profile, you’re probably sunk.

Canon’s software is free, so why does Canon care if people use Affinity? It doesn’t cost Canon a dime in software profits, and it makes their products more pleasant to use.

Affinity has manual vignetting correction. It does not work. The V1’s vignetting is far too severe.

I worked on this for hours yesterday, and AI kept telling me I could correct the photos. It was wrong.

Elements would not even open the files. It kept telling me to download and install its Camera Raw plugin. When I did that, and I tried to open the files again, it told me to download and install its Camera Raw plugin.

I can convert the files to something called DGN, and then I can edit the DGN files. But they don’t contain all of the information in the CR3 files, so it’s a low-grade hack. And if you want to keep the information, you end up with a huge CR3, a huge DGN, and the huge JPG’s you create. Hard drives only go so big.

It’s a stupid approach.

I had to download Canon’s free program: Digital Photo Professional. It works, but I can’t get the exact results I got (apart from the black corners, which wouldn’t go away) with Affinity.

I wasn’t planning to buy any more Canon products after this one, and I would have chosen another Sony compact if I could have found one. Now I am determined never to buy another Canon product as long as I live. I don’t need to be treated this way.

Why not buy another camera? Because the Powershot has absolutely no rival in its niche. Even if you had a billion dollars to spend, you could not do better. It shoots good stills and saves them to raw and JPG. It has a good optical zoom which provides an excellent low end. It does better than the ZV in low light. It has a headphone jack for video monitoring. It won’t overheat. Nothing else comes close. I looked.

If I want a pocket camera that will do what I want, it’s this Canon or nothing. So I have to use Canon’s ridiculous program until a better camera comes out.

Of course, you can’t connect it to a PC. It’s aimed at the saggy-pants Free Palestine crowd. You can upload images to your phone, which is not useful if you’re trying to produce quality work. A grown-up uses a PC, not a phone. You can’t connect the Canon wirelessly or even with a cable. You have to pull the micro SD card out and put it back, over and over and over.

Someone tell me why you need a camera this good to take pictures of you and your saggy pants and exposed underwear for Instagram. It makes no sense.

I want to get rid of it, but since there is no escape route, I will stick with it until someone makes something better.