Recently, camera manufacturers have been driving up lens ratings on cameras to ever-increasing levels, much like the race to drive up megapixel ratings earlier. Just a few years ago, 12x lenses were just about the best that you could get. With the creation of the “super-zoom” class of cameras, they’ve been left in the dust, with 24x or 30x lenses now common. The race really heated up last year with Nikon’s announcement of the Coolpix P510, with its 42x lens. Now Canon has gone to the next level with the PowerShot SX50, featuring a humongous 50x 24-1200 mm lens.
That’s more magnification power than most binoculars can provide! The SX50 allows you to capture huge landscapes or fill the entire frame with a subject kilometers away, just by spinning the lens, without having to switch lenses or cameras.
The camera inherits much from the SX40 before it. It has the same 12.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor, DIGIC 5 processor, and a rotating LCD display. The camera body, however, has been completely redesigned, with a much more sleek and modern looking design. The camera now has an external hot shoe, which can accept any of Canon’s Speedlight EX flashguns, making it much more useful in low-light situations. Wired remote control is also available.
The rear LCD size has been made slightly larger, and has more than twice as many pixels. It is a vari-angle display, which means that it can be tilted and rotated to allow for capturing at odd angles or to reduce screen glare. The 202,000 dot electronic viewfinder is surrounded by a rubber cushion and has a diopter wheel.
ISO range has been expanded from 100-3200 to 80-6400, while burst rate can take 13 frames per second over the previous 10.3. Full HD video recording has been added as well. Face recognition has been built into the camera’s autofocus system.
Twelve settings are available on the camera’s shooting mode dial, including the standard program, shutter priority, aperture priority and manual settings along with settings based on the scene or the subject, such as a sports mode and a landscape mode. A digital effects mode is also available. HD recording modes and even slow motion movie capture modes are available.
The SX50′s focal range is obviously its biggest selling point. Although the camera costs about as much as an entry-level DSLR camera, it offers much more value for its price, since DSLR cameras are either sold with a basic 18-55mm lens, or with no lens at all. Since the full potential of DSLR cameras can only be used in conjunction with a number of lenses, the SX50 offers a better value than any DSLR setups within this price range. In fact, a single DSLR lens for with the same range as the SX50′s lens would easily cost thousands. The fact that Canon has been able to put a lens like this into a fixed-lens camera with the SX50′s price tag is something of a manufacturing miracle. With the ability to take images in JPEG or RAW formats, the camera is a serious alternative to a DSLR.s
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