Canon SX50HS v Nikon P510 v Sony DSC-HX200v

By Birding-Aus, on April 5th, 2013

Thanks for the excellent post — looking for a new camera and your insights are a great help!!

Dave

Birding-Aus

1 comment to Canon SX50HS v Nikon P510 v Sony DSC-HX200v

• peter

  April 5, 2013 at 8:19 am

  Darren J Callesen wrote:

  The main reasons I changed to a DSLR were: – lack of usable manual focus – poor high ISO image quality – bad fringing at full zoom – grainy electronic viewfinder

  I believe that all of these are much improved in more recent cameras than my Canon S3IS. Still not as good as a DSLR, but possibly good enough for me not to have changed over if I’d had something like the SX50.

  Agreed, although there is an advantage to digital zoom. It can sometimes allow more precise autofocusing if you can zoom in enough to get the AF rectangle to fit between the branches it might otherwise try to focus on.

  Good point. Some cameras over compress the file and lose quality.

  Good in theory, but I’ve found that unless the person you deal with knows that camera well, you’ll walk away with photos taken with the camera on the default settings, or whatever the last customer set them to. It’s a good idea to download the camera manual first, and work out what settings to check.

  This is assuming you need glasses but don’t wear them? If you wear your glasses, then barely any dioptre adjustment should be necessary. Everyone needs a little adjustment, so it has to have it available. If you don’t wear your glasses while using the camera then you need to check that it has enough adjustment available for you.

  I don’t think I’ve seen a camera that’s suitable for bird photography that doesn’t have any adjustment, but one should check.

  There’s no doubt that such equipment will produce much better photos that any compact camera, but there is a big price to pay. Apart from the cost, it will be much bigger and heavier. Depending on the kind of photos you want to take and the minimum quality you’re prepared to accept, a DSLR might just be a burden that makes your birding less enjoyable.

  Peter Shute ===============================

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