As you may have noticed, the ’Megapixel Wars’ have calmed down a bit in recent years. That doesn’t mean that camera manufacturers haven’t found something else to drive up to absurd levels. In the case of ’big zoom’ cameras that thing is, of course, how powerful the lens is. Remember a few years ago, when 12X lenses were considered a lot? Since then we’ve gone through 18X, then 24X, and 30X. Things really started to get crazy over the past year, with Nikon releasing their Coolpix P510, which has a 42X lens. Then Canon did what I never thought I’d see: announce the PowerShot SX50 HS ( $479) , which has a whopping 50X, 24 - 1200 mm lens.
Full wide-angle ( 24 mm) Full telephoto ( 1200 mm)
As you can see, the SX50 lets you capture vast landscapes at wide-angle and can also fill the frame with subjects two miles away. There is a caveat that goes along with lenses this powerful, though. If you’re shooting at ISO 80 ( for best image quality) , you’re going to need hands of stone or a tripod in order to get a sharp photo. Conventional wisdom says that you need a shutter speed of 1/focal length in order to get a sharp photo, though you get a few stops back thanks to image stabilization. What I’m getting at here is that you may need to crank up the ISO sensitivity in order to get that sharp photo, unless you’re using a tripod.
The PowerShot SX50 HS retains many of the features of the SX40 that came before it. They include a 12.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor, DIGIC 5 processor, rotating LCD display, manual controls, a hot shoe, and the handy Zoom Framing Assist feature that I’ll explain later. Some new features include RAW support, a slightly larger/sharper LCD, faster AF and continuous shooting speeds, and more available scenes in Smart Auto mode.