Introduction

Design & Appearance

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The camera front has a metallic casing, and a rubber one surrounding the LCD screen on the back. There is a mode dial and a shutter button on the top, as well as a pop up flash nestled just above the lens. The front has a rubber grip that is bumped out slightly. To control playback and settings there is a scroll wheel on the back, right where your thumb will rest. The G100 comes in red, black, and white.

Tour

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Menu

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The menu system is very basic, resembling the interface on the lower-end GE point-and-shoot cameras. The scroll wheel is your main navigator, deftly cycling through all of the modes and settings in the menu screens. Options appear as a column on the left side of the screen, opening up into a row of individual settings in each category when you select one.

Ease of Use

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The buttons are all easy to reach when the hand is at neutral, except for the mode dial. Reaching the mode dial requires a very small hand adjustment. The scroll wheel is surrounded by four buttons and all are intuitively laid out.

Size & Handling

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This little, semi-bridge, GE camera may have some more heavy hardware included in its actual release, but when we had our hands on it, the G100 already had some heft. It is a dense little box measuring 4.2 inches wide, 2.7 inches tall, with 1.3 inches of depth.

Though the G100 had some mass, it was easy to hold in one hand. Using two hands could crowd the lens and the LCD screen, which is the only tool to frame your shot. The bumped-out, rubberized grip on the front was a little too small to be useful. Cupping a hand around the front to hold the G100, we noticed that fingers rested just in front of the grip, and the curve of the fingers did not come in contact with it because the grip did not jut out enough to sit in the curl of our hand.

The buttons were soft and made a satisfying click when depressed to let us know they had been activated. The scroll wheel was responsive and gave us a great indication of how many clicks we were making. The shutter button suffered from being unclear about the autofocus. Half way down, the autofocus is engaged, but often we found that we had just taken a picture instead of autofocusing. Finding that middle push may take some getting used to.

Modes Overview

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The mode dial on the top of the camera helps you easily switch between the various shooting modes. The list of modes is a mix of advanced and beginner settings. For the intermediate users, all of the PASM modes are easily clicked into place using this dial, but for the beginners that like things like Face Beautifier, Panorama Mode, and the preset Scene Modes, they are available on this same dial. You can dial into Movie Mode for some 1080p video capture as well.

Auto Mode

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Many users will be working in Auto mode, which is easy to use and takes reasonably good pictures from what we could tell at CES. Auto mode is the picture of a camera on the mode dial.

Movie Mode

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Movies can be recorded at 1080p for 30fps, 720p in both 30 and 60fps, VGA, or QVGA. You can zoom while recording movies, and you will be happy with the G100 as a clutch little camcorder.

Drive/Burst Mode

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With picture quality set to Fine, you can get 10 full resolution frames per second.

In the menu, there are self-timing options as well as Smile detection options that will not take a photo until all people in the shot are smiling dammit!

Playback Mode

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Hitting the green playback button towards the bottom of the back of the G100 gets you looking at the photos you have taken. You can view them one at a time, in a slide show, by date, or in a grid of 9/16 thumbnails.

You can zoom in on your photos when playing them back, and hitting the display button gives you a mini histogram in the bottom left corner. Playing back your movies is easy and very viewable on the 3-inch LCD screen.

Picture Quality & Size Options

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The {{product.model}} shoots in 4:3 by default but you can change the aspect ratio to 3:2 or 16:9 in a variety of resolutions from 4320x3240 to 640x480. You can choose three different types of image compression on top of this: Normal, Fine, and Best.

Other Modes

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Panorama is one of the main modes on the dial atop the G100. It works quite well actually. After taking your first photo, a cross appears at the left side of the LCD screen and a target at the right. Match them up two times and you have three consecutive pictures linked in an HD pan of your area. We know people that have spent many hours on Photoshop trying to recreate such shots of this kind of quality. Try it out, it can be solid fun.

Focus

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This GE comes with three autofocus modes: Single Point, Multi-point, and Object Tracking. You also have the option to turn continuous autofocus on and off for the burst shooting mode.

The autofocus was responsive, but we had a hard time distinguishing the difference between the shutter being pushed halfway down for autofocus and all the way for taking a picture. There is no manual focus on this GE.

Exposure & Metering

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In auto, from what we could tell at the booth, the exposures looked like they captured a solid mid-ground of lighting; not too dark, not too bright.

The user control PASM modes are available on this bridge model by adjusting the mode dial on the top. Within these modes you can adjust the aperture from f/3.9 to f/5.6, not a very big range given all the supposed manual control.

In auto, the shutter speed can be set from 4 to 1/2000 seconds and in Shutter Priority mode (S) you can set it from 1/2000 of a second up to a full 30 seconds.

In the menu, you can set the light metering to Spot, Multi, and AiAE (Artificial Intelligence Auto Exposure), which uses the sensor to determine the setting and subject, then decides on the proper metering for the photo. AiAE is the default setting for the {{product.model}}.

ISO

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In Auto, the ISO is chosen for you, in manual mode you can set the ISO from 100 to 3200.

White Balance

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In the main menu, one of the options leads you to white balance control. As with other GE models, the white balance defaults to auto. Visually, auto is represented as an A with some triangles beneath it. This representation can make it hard to find the white balance in the menu because the logo for the current setting becomes the logo for the entire category. An A with triangles below it is not the standard logo for white balance, usually represented as WB.

There are plenty of lighting situations to choose from: Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Fluorescent CWF, Incandescent, and Manual where you can set your own Kelvin personally.

Image Stabilization

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The {{product.model}} uses optical image stabilization rather than digital stabilization which is always better. We tried the stabilization out on a fully zoomed shot, both off and on, and saw that it helped make for sharper pictures. We will get a more accurate, less subjective reading when we get it back to Boston for some serious testing.

Picture Effects

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GE has thought of quite a few possible picture taking situations and have provided settings for each of them. The G100 has pre-optimized settings in Scene Mode for Sport, Landscape, Children, Indoor, Leaf (probably meaning foliage), Beach, Text, Party, ID, Sunset, Fireworks, Glass, Museum, Night Landscape, and Night Portrait. Within the scene mode menu, there are options for filters like Sketch and Photo Frame, as well as effects like fisheye, panning shots and multiple exposures.

Lens & Sensor

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The lens is a 14.4-megapixel Aptina, with an A-Pix CMOS sensor, making it a solid piece of equipment. Many companies use Aptina and CMOS sensors, but you shouldn't ask for less. The sensor itself is 1/2.3 inches. The lens can zoom up to 15x, not bad for something this small.

LCD

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The lack of an electronic viewfinder is a bit disappointing, considering GE calls this model a bridge camera. Instead, you get an affixed 3-inch LCD screen with some great definition, using 460,000 pixels. The LCD will adjust its brightness depending on the ambient light to make viewing easier in super sunny situations.

Flash

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The flash manually pops out of the top of the camera, with a G-number of 5.7 feet at ISO 100. You can set the flash to Auto, Red-Eye Reduction, Slow Synchro, Red-Eye and Slow Syncrho, Forced Flash, or off.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

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There is a mini-HDMI port and a USB 2.0 connector. The {{product.model}} comes with a USB cable, but your mini-HDMI will have to be a separate purchase.

The ports are covered by a thick rubber stopper that you can pluck out of place with your fingernail. The cover seems fairly sturdy and like it will stay in place without much effort.

Battery

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The battery on the G100 is a rechargeable Lithium-ion type, and can take about 200 shots in auto mode according to CIPA standards. There is an AC adapter that comes included with the purchase of a G100, allowing you to plug the whole rig into the wall and recharge the battery.

Memory

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SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards up to 128 GB can be fitted into this diminutive bridge camera. There is only 15MB of internal memory, but anyone using a camera knows to get an SD card (just nod your head like "obviously" if you didn't know that).

Conclusion

We question placing the G100 into the bridge category, resembling much more a point-and-shoot than anything like a DSLR. There is no electronic viewfinder, no manual focus and limited options for controlling aperture in the manual mode.

Sure the G100 has a long list of features, like a 15x zoom, 14.4 megapixel CMOS photos, full HD 1080p video capture, continuous shooting, and much more, but many of these features can be found on some of the stronger point-and-shoot models, even in the GE line like the E1410SW.

We will see. It's possible that once we test it, we could be blown away by the quality of the shots produced by the G100, which could justify this camera's claims. Our subjective first look at CES cannot get us everything we need to form a full opinion yet, but with an MSRP of $179.99 it would be pretty spectacular if this questionable bridge model really wowed us.

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Sample Photos

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Specs

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