A generous zoom range is very important for any photographer and in the last period of time every single manufacturer added at least one or two models with super zoom in the line-up.
The opportunity to shoot every image you see is very appealing especially if you can do that using a compact digital camera. The market is filled with models that will make all this possible, all you need to do is take some time and find the one that suits you best. Below you’ll find a brief description of seven cameras and their design and performance features.
Compared to an SLR, a camera that has a small sensor has also smaller lens and this means that it can offer up to a 12x zoom.
A few years ago, both Olympus and Sony introduced on the market 10x zoom cameras but they were very expensive. Today, modern zoom cameras are pretty affordable and much smaller compared to the digital SLRs that feature powerful lenses. These two major advantages made the super zoom cameras very popular.
These great devices offer very generous zoom ranges and that’s why in most cases the lenses are very large and tend to occupy a large part of the camera. A superzoom cam looks very much like a SLR but the true differences between them lie on the inside and can be seem very clearly in the pictures.
In time, the zoom range extended from an average 10x to almost double that number but during this battle for pixel’s supremacy the lens became wider and wider.
These seven models go from average wide angle to super telephoto and all of them feature 12x zoom ranges. On the inside you can find a mechanical or an optical image stabilization which is very helpful when shooting splendid images. In addition to all that the cameras sport full photographic control, electronic viewfinders and a rather attractive design.
The specs lists for each model say that some of the cameras actually share the same lens and that’s mainly because the lenses are provided by a third party supplier.
Panasonic was not the first SLR superzoom camera manufacturer but everyone heard about its 2003 / 2004 models: the FZ20 and the FZ10. And that was only the beginning because in time all major manufacturers joined the game and now they compete for the podium.
During the above mentioned test the following superzooms were analyzed: the Sony Cybershot DSC-H50, the Canon Powershot SX10 IS, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28, the Fujifilm FinePix S2000HD, the Olympus SP-565UZ, the Fujifilm FinePix S8100fd and the Nikon Coolpix P80.
