Canon PowerShot SX50 HS review

Ultra-zoom cameras are incredibly versatile, taking wide-angle, telephoto and macro photography in their stride. The best models cope well in low light too. Last year’s Canon SX40 HS led the field for image quality, particularly in low light, but narrowly missed out on an award because of its trundling performance.

This year’s SX50 HS ups the ante with a record-breaking 50x zoom lens – the biggest ever to grace a stills camera. More importantly to us, it’s also significantly faster in general use, taking 1.8 seconds between shots. That’s a big improvement on the SX40 HS’s 2.8 seconds but still a long way off 0.6 seconds of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200.

Continuous mode is seriously fast, capturing 10 shots at up to 14fps in our tests. However, this performance is only available in a scene preset with barely any control over the camera, and it took six seconds to save these shots before we regained control of the camera. Most situations require more sustained performance, but the best it could manage outside of this scene preset was 1.9fps, or just 0.9fps with continuous autofocus. The screen was blank for most of the time between each shot, which made it virtually impossible to track moving subjects.

It’s much more capable when shooting sedentary subjects. The 1200mm maximum focal length (35mm equivalent) let us frame subjects that we could barely see with the naked eye. Using such a huge magnification while shooting handheld meant we often lost track of the subject, so we really appreciated the button on the side of the lens to zoom out quickly and temporarily to help locate it again.

The rest of the controls and well laid out, with a dedicated button for moving the autofocus point and a custom button that can be assigned to one-click white balance calibration. There’s no button to toggle between the screen and electronic viewfinder, though. Instead, this is achieved by pressing the Display button twice, which felt too longwinded. Then again, the electronic viewfinder’s small size and low 202,000-dot resolution meant we didn’t have much of an urge to use it. The LCD screen is a little smaller than usual, too, at 2.8 inches, but its resolution is sharper than the SX40 HS’s.

Video capture is at 1080p at 24fps. Quality in our tests was excellent, and we’re amazed at how effective the optical stabilisation was at keeping handheld shots steady, even at the full zoom extension. Details weren’t quite as sharp as from the FZ200, though, and low-light clips were noisier. It also lacks the FZ200’s mic input and comprehensive manual control over video exposures. Clips are limited to around 16 minutes and slow-motion clips are at VGA resolution. The FZ200 is undoubtedly the better video camera.

After the success of the SX40 HS we had extremely high expectations of the SX50 HS’s image quality. It mostly performed well but it wasn’t quite the triumph we’d hoped for. Automatic exposures tended to be a little too bright, and we often had to dial in some exposure compensation to avoid clipped highlights. Meanwhile, misjudged automatic white balance sometimes gave skin tones a purple complexion. Canon has added raw support in this update, and processing shots in the bundled Digital Photo Professional software gave much better colours. We’d prefer to do this out of choice rather than necessity, though.

Automatic exposure and white balance weren’t as reliable as we’d expect from Canon, although raw support provides a fix

Focus was better than we expected given the vast zoom range, but it deteriorated in the 600-1200mm range. By 1200mm, heavy chromatic aberrations put multi-coloured halos around high-contrast details that were visible even after we’d resized to fit a computer screen.

There’s nothing much wrong with focus in wide-angle shots, and details at ISO 80 are smooth and crisp 

Chromatic aberrations take a heavy toll at the long end of the zoom 

As with its predecessor, noise levels at fast ISO speeds were among the lowest we’ve seen from an ultra-zoom camera. Comparing its shots with the FZ200 at identical settings, details in its ISO 100 photos were smoother and cleaner. ISO 1600 gave print-worthy results from the Canon while the Panasonic displayed a lot of noise in shadows. However, the Panasonic’s wide-aperture lens meant it caught up and often overtook the Canon for telephoto shots in moderate light.

This is one of the best ultra-zoom cameras for indoor photography, thanks to the low noise from its sensor

The SX40 HS was a superb camera, and the SX50 HS is even better with its faster shot-to-shot times, raw capture and colossal zoom. However, Panasonic has made even bigger strides with the FZ200. Both have their merits but, for us, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200‘s strengths are more compelling.