I’ve been trying to buy a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III for two weeks, and I no longer believe this camera exists.
The Canon G7 X III is so popular that strategies for buying them have become a whole sub-genre of videos on TikTok
It definitely existed at one point. The camera was released in 2019, and I’m sure I used one at least for a little bit because I was working at a camera website then. The G7 X III was the latest in a long line of very good “premium” compact cameras with high-end specs like a big sensor, manual controls, and a decent lens. I’ve recommended G-something-X cameras to people for over a decade, but it’s far from the only option if you want a really good compact. Last I checked, Sony was selling roughly twenty different RX100 models, plus a vlogging-friendly ZV-1 II. So I found the news that the G7 X III in particular was so popular among TikTokers that it is nigh impossible to find in stock a little hard to believe.
Aside from just generally being a good camera, the G7 X III represented Canon’s attempt to appeal to creators. The compact camera market was all but DOA at that point, so Canon and other manufacturers started adding YouTuber-friendly features like built-in streaming capabilities, uncropped 4K video, and creator-focused accessory bundles in an effort to court the last group of people actually buying compact cameras. I was skeptical back then — won’t influencers just want to use their phones? — but time has made fools of us all, because the Canon G7 X III is so popular that strategies for buying them have become a whole sub-genre of videos on TikTok. A search for “how to buy G7 X” will yield dozens of them, and I can confirm your algorithm will happily feed you endless G7 X content after you watch a few. But the reasons for its popularity seem to have very little to do with its influencer-aimed features. And as the G7 X III eluded me over the next several weeks, I had plenty of time to find out what those reasons are.
This all started when a handful of camera nerds in the Verge Slack noticed some TikTokers posting videos about how to buy a Canon G7 X III. In these videos, creators described their long, fraught journeys to finding the camera, often involving help from friends and using the Hotstock app religiously. But… seriously? “There’s no way there are four to five Canon G7 X IIIs flying off the shelf of my local Target every morning,” I declared. That was true, as I learned over the course of the following weeks. But only because my local Target can’t even manage to get a single one of them in stock.
The challenge, specifically, is to find a Canon G7 X III or G7 X II — broadly similar and still sold new — for retail price, which is $799. You can buy a G7 X III from some questionably legitimate third-party sellers on Amazon and Walmart for around $1,500 if you’re desperate. And if you can manage to find a used one, you can still expect to pay over $1,000 for it. Imagine selling a camera you bought five years ago at a three hundred dollar profit. That’s how bananas the G7 X situation is, especially when you remember that you can just buy a Sony ZV-1 right now from every camera retailer I checked.
In the video that sparked this investigation, creator Destiny Deniz says that the trick is to wake up at 5AM and check the Target website. I did this for several days in a row, and also signed up for email alerts with every retailer I could think of. No luck. I began taking more drastic measures, and called in reinforcements.
“There are too many people waiting — we will never meet the demand, unless something changes from a supply perspective.”
Antonio Di Benedetto is The Verge’s laptop reviewer, but also a kind of difficult-to-find gadget whisperer. He introduces me to TrackaLacker, and gives me a couple of other helpful tips like “favoriting” the product in the Target app so it doesn’t keep disappearing when I search for it. I take his advice and set up alerts with TrackaLacker. It also occurs to me that Target might refresh its stock at 5am ET, rather than 5am PT, so I start checking the website when I go to bed, at 2am PT, and when I get up around 7am.
None of it works. Every time I get an in-stock alert the product is already gone by the time I click on it, and I haven’t seen any stock pop up on my late-night checks. That’s when I start to dig into more G7 X-buying TikTok videos and find that the rabbit hole gets even deeper and weirder. One person recommends asking a nightshift nurse to check the Target website for you. (I can’t find any rhyme or reason to Target’s restocking schedule, so having someone who’s awake all night anyway, checking periodically, might actually help.)
Another says that the secret is to call B&H directly and give them your credit card number over the phone to get on some unseen waitlist. One blogger advises against buying the camera too close to Mercury in retrograde. I stopped short of calling B&H or consulting an astrologist, but I did manage to reserve one on backorder with Adorama. In theory, it will cost me $799, but they won’t charge my credit card until it’s actually available. Expected availability: June. The search continues.
I stopped by the electronics department on a Target run on the off chance that somehow a G7 X III had made it onto the shelf. It hadn’t, of course. But the thing I noticed about the camera section at Target is that it consists of two things: Canon cameras and instant cameras. There’s a big, splashy image across the display featuring some smiling Gen Z’ers having a great time with their digital cameras. Nowhere in sight: Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, or any other camera brand. One way or another, Canon locked down the Target demographic.
To try and understand what was happening behind the scenes on the retailer side, I spoke with Rebecca Kaplan, co-owner of Glazer’s Camera in Seattle. She has borne witness to it all over the past decade — specifically, the low-end compact camera market collapsing, followed by the popularity of models like the G7 X and the Fujifilm X100 VI — and she’s a little mystified, too.
“I don’t know why this one took off,” she says, noting that other vendors like Sony and Nikon sell high-end point and shoots with similar features that are readily available She speculates that as manufacturers have shifted resources toward their interchangeable lens cameras, production of these high-end point-and-shoots slowed down over the past few years.
“We only get a handful at a time,” she says, and when cameras come in they’re offered to customers on a pre-order waitlist. But the number of people waiting for a G7 X III vastly outnumbers the cameras that actually come in. “There are too many people waiting — we will never meet the demand, unless something changes from a supply perspective.”
I asked Canon about the supply problem, and got a response from Drew MacCallum, Canon USA’s senior manager of product planning. He says that Canon is “working to meet the consumer demand of the PowerShot G7 X Mark III camera,” and references the recent launch of the PowerShot V1, which is geared toward the same creator segment. It seems that Canon, and by extension the retailers with very few G7 X III cameras to sell, are eager to move customers toward the new device rather than the five-year-old model. The V1 only went on sale in the US a couple of weeks ago, so it’s hard to say yet whether it’s taking off the way the G7 X did, but it is in stock at the big camera retailers.
None of this quite answers the main question: why this camera? Why not a Sony RX100, which uses the same size 1-inch type sensor? Why not a Nikon Coolpix? The well-documented craze around the Fujifilm X100 series makes a little sense, at least. It’s dripping with vintage charm and the film simulation modes are worth the hype. But I don’t see any of that kind of charm when I look at the G7 X. So what do the influencers and creators see that I don’t?
I asked Angwi Tacho, a lifestyle influencer who posted a video featuring her tips and tricks for using the Canon G7 X Mark II, what led her to that camera in particular. Over email, she told me she was looking for something lighter to use for travel vlogs rather than the large DSLR she uses at home. It was down to the G7 X or a Sony, but opted for the Canon. “Ultimately I loved the price and the functionality,” she says. “It was very user friendly.” As someone who owns a Sony camera and constantly fights with the menu system, I can say: that tracks.
In addition to vlog footage, Tacho uses the G7 X for stills — often in place of a phone camera. She calls the photo quality “unmatched,” citing its much more flattering rendering of skin tones. And the thing that helps achieve those pleasing skin tones seems to be the key feature of the Canon G7 X: its pop-up flash.
Many of the videos I watched, including Tacho’s, reference the flash. In a video posted on TikTok last August, beauty vlogger Iya Omaña says that she originally bought the camera in 2019 to create video. “Now it has become viral for the flash photography,” she says. Basically all of the videos I watched offering guidance on the best settings for the G7 X recommend keeping the flash on, day or night. And they have a point: smartphone cameras have had such a difficult time rendering skin tones that Apple’s response has been along the lines of “Eh, you figure it out.” The bigger flash on a camera like the G7 X can illuminate a subject that’s farther away with a more diffuse light that gives skin a nice glow. The smaller flash on a smartphone camera can’t reach as far, and since it’s a smaller light source the effect can be harsh.
“Now it has become viral for the flash photography.”
I don’t think a decent flash is the only thing that sent the G7 X viral, though. Kaplan suspects that there’s something else in the mix too. “Sometimes I think scarcity drives the demand,” she says, citing the high demand and low supply of Leica cameras when they’re released. Cameras like the Leica Q are handmade, and the low numbers that are produced which help tip the supply/demand scale in favor of demand. “This is like a mass market version of that, in my mind.”
The TikTok video that launched this investigation backs up the scarcity theory. Destiny Deniz mentions that she only got her G7 X III because a friend was able to find a couple in stock. “I didn’t even necessarily want one of these as bad as she did,” she says in the clip, “but the opportunity came along and I was like, ‘Oh, these are hard to get your hands on,’ I’d rather pay $799 for it than $1,900 on Amazon.”
On top of all that, the threat of tariffs looms. Canon likely assembles the G7 X III in one of its Japanese factories, but as Kaplan says, “they have parts coming from all over Asia, if not the world. So it’s complicated to make these.” If the supply was already much lower than the demand pre-tariffs, then that sure doesn’t bode well for someone trying to buy a G7 X III. As for me, I’ve given up.
My pre-order with Adorama is still pending, and no matter how fast I jump into the Target app when I get a Trackalacker update, I’ve never seen so much as a single G7 X III available. I started taking it personally every time I got a notification and couldn’t find a camera for sale, and I took that as a sign that it was time to get out of the game. If my local Target ever does manage to stock a G7 X, someone more dedicated — maybe with the stars aligned in their favor — will find it before I do.
