Thanks to a hard-to-beat combination of excellent picture quality, a large optical-zoom reach, simplicity of use, and versatile firing choices, every version of Canon’s PowerShot SX point appears to wind up towards the top of our pocket-megazoom cameras graph. The camera in the household, the 20X-optical-zoom Canon PowerShot SX260 HS ($350 by June 1, 2012), is still another champion. It’s among the simplest point-and-shoot cameras to suggest for just about any person, since many bases are covered so by it.
The 12-megapixel PowerShot SX260 HS’s flexible contact, various firing settings, exemplary picture and movie quality, and manual adjustments all subscribe to its high score. You will find just a few weak places in this camera: It doesn’t take RAW, it’s average battery life, and audio record is just a bit hissy while it’s capturing video. Because of its substantial move variety, it also has a comparatively slim aperture at the wide-angle end–but every wallet megazoom we’ve actually seen also has that disadvantage.
Efficiency, Picture Quality, and Movie Quality
In PCWorld Labs subjective assessments for picture quality, the PowerShot SX260 HS gained a score of Excellent in almost all of our screening groups, specifically in shade accuracy, publicity quality, and insufficient distortion. In picture sharpness it received a score of Good.
The camera’s sharpness rating experienced a bit as a result of obvious moir impact in our target-chart sharpness test, and the camera’s photographs seemed a bit comfortable within our still-life test. Shades seemed bright and lively with no oversaturation we generally see from a lot of today’s cameras, and the SX260 HS’s auto-exposure style made exemplary white-balance and exposure levels within our hands-on tests.
In movie catch, the Canon PowerShot SX500 again placed one of the better models we’ve examined in the pocket megazoom class, generating great distinction, attractive colors, and good details in circumstances. The test footage we shot in low light was not as remarkable, but because of its efficiency within our bright-lighting test, we ranked the PowerShot SX260 HS’s over all movie quality as Excellent.
As previously mentioned before, audio collection through the Nikon COOLPIX S9200 reviews HS’s top-mounted music microphones is a little bit of a weakness. Audio catch in movie style seemed hissy to our subjective jury’s ears, therefore we gave the camera an Audio rating of Fair within our assessments.