I recently purchased a new camera: a Canon SX-50 HS.
Canon SX-50 hs
I wanted to have an alternative to the Canon ELPH-100 HS (my daughter’s camera) wich I was constantly borrowing and using, mostly, for macro photography. The ELPH-100 is a very good little camera, 12 megapixels, compact and easy to use and it takes good pictures. It is small enough to fit in your pocket and shines when you want to take outdoors photos of people and landscape. But inside, under tungsten lights and in extreme close-ups, it has limited capacities and I was constantly shooting multiple time each subject, struggling to get the focus ok and no matter what setting I used, the colors were always washed out, so I had to post-process the photos in Photoshop to color-correct them. Don’t get me wrong: the ELPH is a very good camera. The point is I needed more, but I am not a very good photographer so the camera needs to do a bit of work for me and be somewhat easy to use. So, I needed a “bridge”: a camera that is in that category between professional cameras and casual cameras.
Enters the SX 50 HS (12 megapixels too).
Man, this camera is AWESOME! Out of the box, in full AUTO with no special setting, most of the test shots were better than the ones I was taking previously with the ELPH!
I won’t do a full review of the camera here (there are web sites that do this already), but I just wanted to share a fun experiment I did: I took a photo of the ELPH-100 using the SX-50 HS, then I did the opposite and took a picture of the SX-50 HS with the ELPH-100. Same lighting, hand-held camera in both cases, ISO 80 for the SX and 100 for the ELPH, macro setting on, auto white balance (AWB) on.
The results are striking:
Canon SX-50 HS camera (photo taken with a Canon ELPH-100 HS camera)
Canon ELPH-100 HS camera (photo taken with a Canon SX-50 HS camera)
And another test here, with a mini base (the base is 2 X 2 inches):
Upper right corner, photo taken with the ELPH-100 HS. All other photos were taken with the SX-50 HS.
And an extreme close-up macro shot for fun:
Extreme close up of a miniature base, taken with the Canon SX-50 HS.
The macro capacities of this camera are excellent! So much in fact that I think I want to take it a step further, so I ordered a Raynox DCR-250 macro lens to take picture of tiny tiny tiny things for fun. Maybe I’ll get to see a Higgs Boson if I’m lucky 🙂
At the other end of the spectrum, the “50” in SX-50 HS stands for 50X zoom. Yep, it has a 50X optical zoom! Being somewhat more in my man cave than in the great outdoors recently, I haven’t experimented with the super-zoom yet. But 50X! Seriously? It’s like a telescope: look for tests and videos on YouTube about this camera and you’ll be amazed!
I’m a happy camper! 🙂
MINIONVAULT 