Canon's PowerShot SX50 HS has an extraordinary 50x zoom lens

Hi, there. I'm Josh Goldman, Senior Editor with CNET. And this is a camera with a really long lens. It's the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS. And if you simply must have the longest lens in the room, its 50X zoom will certainly get you there. It goes from a wide 24 millimeters all the way out to 1200 millimeters. Now, what you do with lens that long is none of my business but it does give you a lot of range to play with in a compact package, all things considered. There are some downsides to having that much zoom, mainly, it gets difficult to keep the camera steady and your subject in frame especially if it's moving. To help with that, the camera has excellent image stabilization and a button on the barrel to let you lock the stabilization on the subject in the center of the frame. You can also use this other button here to pull back the lens, to find your target, shouldn't leave your shot, and then releasing it zooms the lens back to the original position. Some other things to consider are that the lens' maximum apertures are somewhat small, F34 at the wide end and F65 in telephoto. So, you may end up using its higher ISO settings when using the zoom. The control pad and the nav wheel are nearly flush with the body and because of its position, I frequently hit it when shooting, launching the self-timer. And while I like having an EBF, even a small one like this, and the Vari-angle LCD, switching between them requires double pressing the display button or rotating the display into the body. Outside of those things, which may or may not be deal breakers for you, it's a very good camera with lots of shooting options from full auto to full manual, raw image capture, good 1080p movie quality, and improved shooting performance from the SX48 HS. Overall, it's competitor from Panasonic, The FZ200 is still a better camera if more expensive. But for zoom fans, the Canon is in. I'm Josh Goldman and that's the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS.