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The Canon PowerShot SX60 HS ($549.99) is one of the more expensive superzoom cameras on the market, but it manages to put all of the pieces together to earn Editors’ Choice accolades for superzooms that crack the 50x barrier. Its 65x lens covers an incredible zoom range, the 16-megapixel sensor is capable of capturing images in Raw format as well as 1080p60 video, and it’s got integrated Wi-Fi. At $550 the SX60 HS is priced on the high side, but if you’re set on a lens that enters überzoom territory, it’s the one to get.
Design and Features
Like all cameras in this class, the SX60 HS ($479.00 at eBay)(Opens in a new window) looks a lot like an SLR. It’s only available in black, there’s a hot shoe and viewfinder, and when its zoom lens is retracted, it isn’t that much smaller than the kit lens included with entry-level SLRs. The SX60 measures 3.6 by 4.5 by 5 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.4 pounds. It’s a little heavier than the Nikon Coolpix P600 ($200.98 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) (3.4 by 5 by 4.2 inches, 1.2 pounds), a similar long zoom camera with a 60x zoom lens.
The SX60’s lens boasts a 65x zoom ratio, the biggest ratio we’ve seen in this class. The 21-1,365mm (equivalent) f/3.4-6.5 zoom covers one of the widest angles of any fixed lens camera, and it can zoom in to capture distant objects thanks to its extreme telephoto reach. You can see the breadth of the zoom for yourself; the image of Madison Square Garden above was captured at the widest angle and the shot of the goalie below is zoomed all the way in. Of current models, only the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ70 ($249.99 at eBay)(Opens in a new window) is wider, and its 20-1,200mm lens is just barely wider at that.
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Saying that it’s difficult to keep track of a moving subject when zoomed to a 1,365mm angle of view is an understatement. Canon includes a framing assist function, activated via The Framing Assist Seek button on the lens barrel, to alleviate this issue. If you’re trying to focus on a bird or other object that’s moving about you can hold the button down, which backs the lens out and displays a box on the Live View feed that indicates the zoomed in frame. Releasing the button returns the lens to its zoomed in position. There’s another button below this one on the lens barrel, Framing Assist Lock; holding that down when tracking a subject leverages the optical stabilization system to help keep the object in frame, even if your camera movement isn’t quite perfect. Using these two functions together makes framing and tracking distant subjects a bit of an easier task than it is with other superzoom cameras.
The Framing Assist Seek button has a secondary function that can be configured via the menu. It works with face detection to automatically zoom in for portraits. It can be set to frame just the face, the upper body, the whole body, or a custom size which you define. The function works well; it had no issues tracking the face of my test subject. The practical applications of this function may not be vast, but if you’re a parent attempting to take photos of your offspring in the school play, it could make your job a bit easier.
Canon places additional physical controls on the top and rear. The top plate houses the zoom rocker and shutter release, the programmable Shortcut button, the power button, and a mode dial. The rear houses the standard playback, Wi-Fi, and delete controls, a Record button, a button that allows you to adjust the active focus point, and physical controls to adjust exposure compensation, the drive mode, the flash output, and the macro focusing mode. It’s a strong control layout, and I especially liked the placement of the focus point adjustment button, right next to the rear thumb rest.
Additional shooting adjustments can be made via an on-screen overlay menu, accessible via the rear Func./Set button. A column of control options runs along the left of the screen, with options for each displayed as a row on the bottom. Various setting can be adjusted from this menu, including the ISO, white balance, metering pattern, self-timer, dynamic range and shadow correction, and image quality and video resolution.
The rear display is mounted on a hinge, so it can tilt out to be viewed from the side, front, above, or below, and can sit flush against the rear facing either in or out. The 3-inch LCD is very bright and quite sharp thanks to a 922k-dot resolution, so there are no complaints there. The eye-level EVF, which can be activated via the Display button or simply by closing the rear display so that the LCD isn’t visible, is also quite sharp. It’s a little bit bigger than the 202k-dot EVF that Panasonic uses in the FZ70, and sharper at 922k-dots. You’ll need to move up to a premium bridge camera with a shorter zoom lens like the Panasonic FZ1000 ($897.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) or Sony RX10 ( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) to get a significantly better EVF.
As you’d expect from a camera at this price point, Wi-Fi is built in. You can use Canon’s free CameraWindow app for iOS or Android to transfer JPG images and video clips to your smartphone or tablet; Raw transfer is not supported. Setting up the connection between an iPhone and the camera is pretty simple. There’s a button with the outline of a phone on the rear of the SX60, after you press that, it’s a simple matter of connecting the phone to a network broadcast by the camera. If you have an Android phone that supports NFC, you can connect by tapping the two devices together; the NFC sensor is on the left side.
You can also upload images directly to popular Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. You’ll need to connect the SX60 HS to a network and set up a Canon Image Gateway account to do so, but once that’s done you can post directly from the camera whenever it’s connected to a network. There’s no in-camera GPS, but if you enable the CameraWindow location logger, you can add location metadata to photos over Wi-Fi—just be sure that the time on your phone and camera are synchronized.
Finally, remote control from your phone or tablet is possible. Controls are limited—you can zoom the lens, set the self-timer, control the flash ouput, and fire the shutter, but that’s it. There’s no way to select a focus point, or to control other settings. For a camera that has full manual control available, that’s a disappointment.
Performance and Conclusions
Performance and Conclusions
The SX60 HS starts up and captures an in-focus image in about 1.8 seconds, which is not bad at all for a camera in this class. Its focus speed is quick at the widest angle, just 0.1-second, but it does slow to 0.6-second when zoomed all the way in. That’s not quite as quick as the Panasonic FZ70 (0.4-second), but it’s no time at all when you compare it with the Nikon P600 (1.7 seconds).
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Continuous shooting speed varies based on the file format and focus settings. The camera does its best when capturing JPGs with fixed focus—it manages 6.3 seconds there. If you switch to shooting Raw, it drops to 1.4fps, and slows again to 1.2fps when shooting Raw+JPG. If you enable continuous autofocus—focus between every shot—the camera manages 3.7fps in JPG mode and 0.8fps in Raw or Raw+JPG mode.
I used Imatest(Opens in a new window) to check the sharpness that the SX60’s insanely long zoom lens manages at a few of the focal lengths we’re able to check in our testing lab. At 21mm it scores 2,180 lines per picture height on a center-weighted sharpness test, better than the 1,800 lines we look for in an image. That quality holds through most of the frame, but we did noticed softness at the edges; they show just 1,351 lines.
The center-weighted score is steady at 50mm (2,040 lines) with improvements at the edges (1,651 lines). At 115mm camera scores 1,889 lines and it manages 1,862 lines at 200mm; edges top 1,700 lines in both instances. That’s not the highest score we’ve seen in a long zoom camera; the Fujifilm FinePix S1 ( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) scores 3,375 lines at its widest angle, but that sky-high number is the result of images that have been sharpened a bit too much by its JPG engine.
Imatest also checks images for noise, which can reduce detail and add an unwanted grainy quality to photos at higher ISO settings. The SX60 HS keeps noise under 1.5 percent through ISO 400, and shows just 1.7 percent at ISO 800. A simple noise score doesn’t tell the whole story, as noise reduction that’s too aggressive can hurt image detail. I took a close look at images from our ISO test scene on a calibrated NEC MultiSync PA271W($999.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) to see how the SX60 did at each of its ISO settings. At ISO 400 fine lines in our test scene are still discernable, but they start to show signs of being smudged together at ISO 800. At ISO 1600 they’ve mostly blurred together, and at the top ISO 3200 sensitivity they’ve been washed away. The Panasonic FZ70 does a slightly better job preserving detail at comparable ISOs, but it lacks some useful features that the SX60 includes.
The SX60 HS also supports Raw image capture. Raw images retain a lot more picture information so that you can make adjustments to exposure after a photo has been captured, and don’t have noise reduction applied in camera. Raw image detail is strong through ISO 800. There’s some smudging at ISO 1600, but images are still quite useable. At ISO 3200 the smudging has overtaken the detail, but images shot at the top sensitivity will be fine for sharing on the Web. If you shoot Raw, you may want to apply a little extra sharpening (beyond the standard 25 adjustment applied by Lightroom) at ISO 400 and below, as images look a little soft there.
Video is recorded at up to 1080p60 quality in MP4 format. The video is very sharp with excellent detail and faithful colors. The camera’s internal mic picks up audio clearly, and there’s no evidence of noise from the lens zooming, the stabilization system, or the focus system on the video soundtrack. The camera shows some motion artifacts from rolling shutter during quick pans at extreme focal lengths, but it’s largely a nonissue. The stabilization system does a good job keeping handheld video steady. I noticed some jittering when shooting at 1,365mm in our testing studio, but it wasn’t distracting when shooting in the field.
There’s a microphone input, so you can connect an external mic if you’re more serious about video. There’s a hot shoe, so you can use that to mount the mic, but it can also accommodate a Canon Speedlite flash unit. You can also connect a wired remote, an HDTV via mini HDMI, or offload images to a computer via mini USB. Canon includes an external battery charger with the SX60 HS, and the camera itself has a single card slot that supports SD, SDHC, and SDXC memory cards.
We’ve yet to award an Editors’ Choice designation to the latest crop of bridge cameras that break the 50x barrier, simply because we hadn’t yet reviewed one that delivered the entire package. The Nikon P600 impressed with its image quality, but its focus speed when zoomed in was beyond sluggish; the Fujifilm FinePix S1 is weather-sealed and quick to focus, but its lens showed too much purple fringing to earn top honors; and the Panasonic FZ70, which is actually a stronger performer at higher ISOs than the SX60 HS, simply cut too many corners to make the grade.
The Canon PowerShot SX60 HS puts all of the pieces together. Its lens is sharp, and it covers a 65x zoom range that starts at an incredibly wide angle. It’s got a sharp vari-angle display; a good EVF; its focus speed is acceptable, even when zoomed all the way in; and Wi-Fi is built in. It doesn’t show quite as much detail at high ISOs as the Panasonic FZ70, but there’s not a huge gap between the two cameras, and the SX60 HS’s extra features more than make up for it. If you feel that you need a model with this type of zoom range, this is the one to get. It is on the pricey side, and if you can live with a shorter zoom, there are more affordable options out there, including Panasonic’s excellent 24x FZ200 ( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , which maintains an f/2.8 aperture through its entire zoom range.
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The Canon PowerShot SX60 HS has a lens that covers an extreme zoom range, and even though it’s on the pricey side, it earns our Editors’ Choice award.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/canon-powershot-sx60-hs