The new and haussed upper segment digital compact camera Canon PowerShot G7 actually is a wonderful machine. It has 10 Mpixel resolution and good optics. 
This should actually have been a throughout positive review of this camera if it had not been for certain drawbacks I have discovered. They were not visible at first but through the first months of operation it became apparent that not everything is as good as it superficially may seem, and as the months pass by it became even more blatantly obvious that not everything about this little darling is equally wonderful. A particularly irritating ”Feature” (for computer people, read: ”bug” Others, read: ”misconstruction”) is the fact that the cameras lens admits large amounts of dust. The dust further gathers close to the focal plane, making the dust particles more or less clearly visible in the images (it may very well gather at other points in the machine as well where it, this far, doesn’t affect the image). The particles are clearly visible, especially at small apertures, making long focal lengths at the long end of the zoom range, which have smaller aperture span than the wide angle range, particularly sensitive to this problem. This might not have been such a big problem if this camera had been a SLR with detachable lenses, but as the camera has a fixed zoom lens it is just about impossible to take care of the dust on your own, as pressurised air and other such careful external emergency solutions proves ineffective.
I am both relieved, by knowing I’m not alone having this problem, and getting more upset by seeing this American guy having problems with his G7… I have exactly the same problem. I bought my camera in Japan while I was working there last Christmas. Today I have a SHITLOAD of dust inside the camera, and I have all the time kept the camera in an extra bag or similar to protect it from this kind of situation. We can all see that this strategy obviously failed. If someone is interested they can have a look at some full res samples taken with my camera at http://www.gandoon.com/pictures/G7 (Warning! large files, ~2-3MB).
The most evil thing of all is that I get the impression that Canon does not issue ”Worldwide” warranties but rather some sort of regionally tied policies, and thus for me, being a European citizen my warranty, and in practice, my camera is sort of worthless, unless I for some reason go to Japan within the one year warranty period and have the opportunity to have a warranty repair while being there. I still have not confirmed if the warranties actually work this way. Hopefully they are a little bit more generous than the information they initially give out may hint, as I am fairly confident that I would get a warranty repair for this kind of problem as the American I mentioned above actually got a warranty cleaning of his camera and it seems to have worked for him.
