Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I ordered the SX50 through Amazon, I tried it out, I liked it well enough and I intend to keep it. For what it does best, it works very well. For the rest, well... that depends. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& This is a video I shot of a fishing boat in Monterey Bay. I used my new SX50 with a 50X optical zoom and a 4X digital zoom for a total of 200X (sort of.) I know it's pixillated, but still just look carefully and you can see the fisherman casting his fishing pole at the stern of the boat and then sitting down. Pretty amazing video technology they have developed for this camera. So that is where this review starts - with the monster-zoom telephoto lens. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& What this camera does best is pretty obvious - it has a monster-zoom telephoto lens. I enjoy doing some telephoto work, and for that purpose it works amazingly well. At a 1200mm - 50X - zoom you simply cannot buy a Canon DSLR lens with that kind of magnification for any amount of money.*1 The largest [standard production] DSLR telephoto lens that Canon makes is an 800mm and that lens costs over $13,000. So there you have it. For around $500 you can run circles around that magnification, get some fantastic shots and have a lot of fun with it. It will most definitely amaze your friends when you show them with what you can do with the monster-zoom feature alone. *1 Technically, "any amount of money" is not completely true here. Another poster has pointed out that on special order Canon will make a 1200MM lens for a DSLR. It weighs about 40 lbs. The MSRP is $100,000. Only a few dozen have ever been produced. My bad. It also has a wide ISO range (film speed) combined with some very fast shutter speeds for fast-action shots. And the recovery and repeat shot time is very fast too. There is also built-in HDR (High Dynamic Range) feature that will be fun to use for creating vibrant-colored, surreal landscapes. (Don't try it with portraits though, since HDR is notoriously bad at distorting human skin tones.) For the more advanced shooters it also offer RAW files as well as RAW plus JPEG, so that you can fine-tune your photos with post-processing in a Photoshop-type program. All around this should turn out to be a good recreational and family-fun camera that will work very well for daytime things like social events and sporting events, particularly at getting candid shots of people all the way across the other side of the auditorium or the sports arena. And it has an excellent HD video feature that - with a good secure tripod - can produce some very respectable quality videos. Unfortunately, the "hot shoe" for the camera only works with an external flash, not a high-quality external microphone. So no, it won't take one, so you don't even need to ask. Yes, of course with a high quality HD video feature you would only expect that Canon would allow you to attach a high-quality external microphone to the hot shoe, but no they don't. You can take that up with Canon - again - just the way people did last year, and see how far you get with it. Otherwise you will simply have to enjoy it the way it is, or else use a tape recorder and sync the sound with it in a movie-making program afterwards. But if you want to take any long-exposure, nighttime shots with it, then this camera probably will not work for you at all. It COULD take them easily, but for marketing reasons Canon put an arbitrary ISO limit on it last year that will no longer let it take them. (Earlier models of this same camera could easily take them before Canon imposed the arbitrary ISO limit on it.) If you have ever owned any of the previous cameras of this series, (the SX1, SX10, SX20 and SX30,) then you probably know that it has a rather small 1/2.3 sized sensor, but (now) it processes the images with a very good DIGIC 5 processor. If you have also owned an SX40, then you also may be aware of a rather recent limitation on this line of cameras that the previous models did not have. Beginning with the model SX40 Canon put an arbitrary ISO (film speed) limit on the camera which severely restricts one type of photography in particular - long-exposure, low-light, nighttime photographs. They are now almost impossible to take with this line of camera, because the user can no longer select any ISO greater than 100 at any of the slower shutter speeds, not even in full manual mode. ISO 100 is a film speed (nowadays called "sensor sensitivity", but the numbers are identical) that has been traditionally used only in bright daytime photo shooting. Low light and nighttime exposures have always required faster film speeds like ISO 400, ISO 800, ISO 1000 or even more. Photos of that type which had always been easy to take with earlier models of this camera suddenly became almost impossible to take beginning with the SX40. Suddenly any attempt to set the shutter speed to slower than 1.3 seconds automatically reduced the camera setting to ISO 100. There was no way for the user to bypass this limit, (without resorting to a special Hacker program available on the internet called "CHDK." Watch a YouTube video on that before you decide to try it. ) There were a lot of complaints about the ISO limit on the SX40 from a lot of users (me included - see the YouTube video on "Canon SX40 ISO limits,") going on for a year now, and finally Canon has introduced the new model SX50. So here's the bad news... Canon did not take the ISO limit off this line of cameras. In fact, the ISO limit on the new SX50 is even worse. Now any attempt to drop the shutter speed under 1 second automatically drops the ISO setting to ISO 80. The user cannot change this limit, even in full manual mode. Adding to that problem, the SX50 has also reduced the widest aperture opening from f/2.7 to f/3.4. The aperture is the size of the opening that allows light to enter the camera through the lens. It is variable, and the smaller the number the larger the opening. So on the new SX50 the largest size to which you can open up the aperture to let light in has been reduced from f/2.7 to f/3.4. The result is that now it is even harder to take low-light, long-exposure, nighttime photographs with it. The current Canon SX160 with the same-sized sensor (though a CCD and not a CMOS sensor) does NOT have this arbitrary limit on it, and does very well at taking long-exposure, nighttime photographs, so I bought it too - for less than half the price of the SX50 - and I gave that one a very strong 5-star rating. Since my primary use of my cameras, however, is expressly for taking long-exposure nighttime photographs, and since there is NO TECHNICAL REASON for putting this arbitrary ISO limit on the SX50 camera (it has already been established during the previous year that it was a marketing decision) - then I'm giving this camera a 4-star rating instead of a 5-star rating. Not for what it CAN'T do, but simply for what Canon will no longer LET it do. If you want to use the camera for a similar purpose - nighttime long exposures, moonlit night scenes, deer in the garden at night, wide-angle star shots or anything similar to those themes, then this camera will not work well for you at all. I understand that the audience for that usage may well be only a small percentage of all users. Still, some users will be effected by it and they need to know. During the last year quite of few of them were pretty upset by that ISO 100 limit on the SX40, so those same users will probably like the the more restrictive ISO 80 limit on the new SX50 even less. In case there is any doubt about it, the online .pdf file for the User Manual at Canon's website clearly states on pages 150 and 152 - "With shutter speeds of 1.3 seconds or slower, ISO speed is [symbol "ISO80"] and cannot be changed." If that effects you, then now you know about it. If it doesn't effect you, then you can simply ignore this part of the review and then you may well have a lot of fun with this camera. With it's many other features I'm sure it will be a lot of fun, and that is one of the reasons I am keeping it myself - for those other features. But for $500 for a digital camera you should at least know very clearly what you will be getting for your money, ... and what you will not. Best wishes either way you decide, John