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| Canon Powershot SX60 |
I wanted a backup camera to my Panasonic FZ1000 for an upcoming holiday. The SX60 looked suitable based on published specifications. So I bought one and tested it over a two month period.
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| Focal length Equivalent 81mm I have printed up a frame from this series to 390x640mm actual picture size. The print looks strong, clear and sharp on the wall with no visible grain, although grain is easily seen on screen at full size. |
Description and features
On paper and to some extent in the polycarbonate, the SX60 has considerable appeal.
It is a mainstream entrant in the ‘all purpose, do everything’ travel/holiday superzoom genre.
Size and mass are right in the goldilocks zone. It is large enough to have all the key features of a proper camera yet small and light enough to carry anywhere in a small bag.
It has a well designed handle and thumb support, fully articulated monitor, decent EVF over the lens, built in flash, hotshoe, zoom range from very wide to very long, a decent lookingset of buttons and dials, programmable function buttons and [mode dial + front dial] control system just like a DSLR.
It has RAW + JPG capture, single or continuous shooting AF, Macro function, video, Wi-Fi and all the usual features of a modern, all purpose consumer camera including such gems as ‘Smile Detect’ and ‘Wink Self Timer’ (really) for the inveterate gimmick lover.
The ‘Frame Assist-Seek’ feature is welcome. Pressing a button on the side of the lens barrel pulls the lens back to a wide setting so you can find your subject. The lens zooms out again when the button is released.
Macro Focus Mode is very useful. It allows the camera to focus on small objects like insects and little flowers while retaining useful working distance. This permits close ups on the run without having to use a tripod or any elaborate preparation. The fully articulated monitor makes the process even easier.
The spec sheet and my initial ‘hands on’ with the camera were encouraging.
Some reviewers have complained about the lack of a touch screen but for hand held work especially at long zoom, I find a touch screen is of little use.
Other reviewers have complained about the lack of an eye sensor for automatic switching between the EVF and monitor. Fair enough an eye sensor would be nice but it is not required. The EVF is active if the monitor is turned inwards. The monitor is active if it is turned out.
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| Focal length E500mm from RAW |
Picture Quality
Just like similar superzoom models from other manufacturers the SX60 uses a very small sensor, measuring 6.17 x 4.55mm with a diagonal of just 7.66mm. This is less than half the area of my little fingernail. Somehow they get 16 million photosensitive pixels onto this tiny area. I can’t even begin to imagine how the micro engineering for this might work, but somehow it does albeit with some compromise to image quality.
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| The moored yachts were about 750 meters from the camera. Hand held Focal length E1360mm, from RAW original with strong sharpening |
At its best the SX60 can produce images of very high quality, able to print up to A3 size and still look clear and sharp with a commanding presence on the wall.
At its worst the SX60 can turn out smeared images which resemble impressionist watercolours more than photographs.
The camera can make images of very good quality outdoors in good light, especially at the near/wide and mid section of the zoom range.
The more adventurous photographer who wants to work indoors, in low light, with moving subjects such as children at play with high ISO settings or at the long end of the zoom range will soon find him or her self struggling with the luminance noise in RAW files or the smearing, watercolour effect of heavy handed noise reduction in JPGs.
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| The SX60 does close ups on the run very well. This Grevillea was at about waist height. I opened out the monitor, set Macro focussing and quickly made a series of exposures. Several were sharp even though a breeze was blowing the flower about. Focal length E180mm. |
The built in flash might get plenty of use indoors.
* Exposure is excellent in all conditions.
* Dynamic range (highlight and shadow detail) is quite good at low ISO settings with a mild tendency to blow out highlights if subject brightness range is high.
* Colors look natural with RAW capture but unbalanced in the JPGs with oversaturated greens and yellows.
* Luminance noise is evident in RAW files at base ISO sensitivity and is very prominent at high ISO settings, detracting from resolution, sharpness and color.
JPGs utilise heavy noise reduction (NR) even with [HI ISO NR set to LOW] leading to watercolor effect which impairs rendition of human faces and hair. The effect is prominent at high ISO settings.
General subjects without humans or cute furry animals fare better with the JPG rendition.
JPG Contrast, Sharpness, Saturation and Color Balance are adjustable via Func.Set>My Colors>Custom Color.
JPG NR is only user adjustable via the ‘High ISO NR’ tab in the Shooting Menu. I set this to ‘Low’.
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| Focal length E786mm. Hand held. JPG original, uncropped. I set Continuous Shooting AF and made about 250 shots of surfers that day and discarded almost all of them. This sort of photography is actually very difficult, mainly because it is extremely hard to keep the subject in frame let alone in focus. Many frames had the surfer more out of frame than in. |
* The lenshas an amazing 65x zoom range.
Sharpness varies with focal length.
At the wide end, focal length Equivalent 21mm, the center of the frame delivers impressive amounts of detail but the corners are a bit soft and don’t really clean up when the aperture is stopped down.
This might not suit landscapes but for most subjects the corner softness is not a problem.
Very good results across the frame are obtainable from about E28 – E400mm focal length. When I think that these pictures are coming off a sensor only 7.66mm in diameter the results seem quite amazing. I printed a test photo from this zoom range at an actual picture size of 635 x 390 mm and it looks really good with excellent detail and quite good highlight and shadow detail. Luminance noise (grain) at ISO 100 is not visible in the print .
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| This is what happens when you shoot 500 meters across a local geographic hot spot, in this case a beach, on a warm day. The combination of the softish lens at the long end and atmospheric distortion produce this impressionist painting appearance. By the way, any camera with any lens would be equally affected by the atmospheric distortion. I just put this in for fun. |
But as the lens zooms out towards the long end it loses contrast and sharpness, with a tendency to local flare in bright conditions. Which could be a problem because you really need bright light to hand hold at the long end of the zoom.
I can still make good A4 prints and decently presentable A2 prints from shots made at full zoom.
Chromatic aberration and distortion are well corrected presumably in post capture software.
Purple fringing is common at high contrast edges and appears in JPGs. It is mostly correctable in
Adobe Camera Raw (and presumably Lightroom which uses the same process).
* The Image Stabiliser works very well, allowing the careful user to handhold at the long end of the zoom. My tests indicate approximately a 2 EV step shutter speed advantage with the IS on. This might not sound like much with some cameras claiming 5 stops of benefit. But it is still very useful.
In fact this camera would be unusable hand held at full zoom without the IS.
The IS allows me to reliably get sharp pictures at the long end of the zoom from a shutter speed of 1/125 second with careful holding technique.
JPG or RAW
I imagine that many, perhaps the majority of this camera’s users will probably use JPG capture exclusively. If they keep to the wide-to-mid range of the zoom, outdoors, good light and reasonably static subjects I think most will be well enough pleased.
But RAW capture and careful editing in a good RAW converter such as Adobe Camera Raw (which I use) can produce much better results.
And therein lies the paradox of the SX60.
The camera will very likely be used by the group least able to get the best image quality from the camera.
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| ISO 1250, JPG straight out of camera. |
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| This is from the RAW version of the same photo as above converted in Adobe Camera Raw to the best of my ability. You can have either the watercolor look of the JPG or the sharper but more grainy appearance of the converted Raw file. The converted RAW file could be processed to look like the JPG but I prefer the 'grainy but sharper' look. |
* Sharpening in Photoshop Camera Raw.
In the Sharpen Panel with files from most cameras I generally set the Amount slider to about 50 and the Radius slider to 1.0 pixels.
But with the SX60 I find files from the wide end of the zoom range require a different treatment from those made with the long end of the zoom because the long telephoto shots have lower contrast and sharpness.
For the wide end I set an Amount of 50-60 and Radius of 1.2-1.4 pixels.
For the long end I experiment with an Amount of 60-100 and Radius of 1.5-2.5 pixels.
This aggressive sharpening is often useful. The downside is an increase in the already prominent luminance noise (grain).
On balance I find the sharpened-but-grainy pictures from converted RAW files more appealing than the watercolour look of the standard JPGs.
Performance
* Single autofocus generally works well. It is decently quick at the wide end of the zoom and acceptable at the long end and/or low light for subjects not moving quickly. Although not lightning fast the AF locks on smoothly without hunting back and forth. It is commendably accurate with very few misfocussed frames.
* With JPG capture ‘Continuous Shooting AF’ works surprisingly well in bright light and around mid zoom range. I photographed cars moving towards and away from the camera at about 30 kph. At 5 frames per second 85% of frames were acceptably sharp and only 10% completely out of focus.
There are three main problems which make the camera much more difficult to use on moving subjects at the long end of the zoom:
* The image you see in the viewfinder is not a preview of the next shot but a review of the previous one or the one before that.
* The diagonal angle of view is only about 2 degrees, so it is very difficult to keep in frame any subject moving across the line of sight.
* Autofocus slows as the lens is zoomed out.
Birds in flight ? Not likely.
* There is a manual focus function which I did not find to be useful. As described on Page 79 of the
User Guide there is a rigmarole of button presses on the badly designed 4 way pad to bring up and activate manual focus all of which gets you to the “general focal position”. Then you activate “Safety MF” by half pressing the shutter button which activates autofocus to “fine tune” the focal position which you could have done simply by half pressing the shutter button in the first place.
* In single shot mode and RAW capture with AF and AE on each frame, shot to shot time is 1.4 seconds. The EVF or monitor black out for about 0.6 seconds after each single shot exposure.
* The lens takes 2.5 seconds to traverse the full zoom range.
Next post- Ergonomics and summary
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