There have been superzooms in past times that have promised to get you right into the action, but the SX30 from Canon is about to beat every one of them, offering an incredible 24mm-840mm focal length range. That’s a 35x optical zoom atop the generous 24mm wide angle. If you thought the macro option might suffer as a consequence of this then think again. It’s rated at 0cm. That’s right, you can push the lens right up against the subject. So, the numbers sound amazing, just how well does it stand up in the cold light of day?
Canon PowerShot SX30 IS: Features
The SX30 is just by pointing out zoom. Everything is based around it. Naturally with such a colossal range your aperture, image stabilisation and ISO range become very important. Fortunately that at the wide angle end you get f/2.7 and in the end of the telephoto it’s f/5.8. There’s lens-shift image stabilisation in the system that consists of one Hi-UD lens, one UD lens and one double-sided aspherical lens. Canon has put a lot of effort into getting as good a quality lens as possible onto the camera. The 14.1Mp CCD sensor is backed up by the DIGIC 4 with iSAPS processing engine and there’s an enhanced i-Contrast feature for brightening shadows. On the back, the LCD screen is 2.7in but only has 230k dots (not pixels) which makes it pretty mediocre. It does flip out and rotate to help with tricky shots, especially macro ones though. There’s also an EV as well but no automatic switching between the two. In fact it requires two presses of the display button to change between them and to change back. The first press adds a histogram to the present display.
See that this camera is clearly gonna be aimed at the photographer rather than happy snapper, the mode dial concentrates on programmed modes. There are three specific scene modes and a general scene mode option, but with two custom settings and AP, SP and M modes, the target user is fairly clear
Canon PowerShot SX30 IS: Handling
There have been some complaints that it’s quite plasticky. Well, it isn’t that bad, but neither is it great quality. It does feel heavy in the hand at 601g and it’s fairly bulky. The handling is fine for shooting, but the dial on the back instead of having a proper control wheel is irritating because the feedback from it is sloppy. Because the zoom is so long it’s easy to lose track of things, so there’s a quick pull back out button to provide you with a wide view before returning to the focal length you were at. Unfortunately it’s next to the thumb position making it all too easy to press against. Otherwise, handling is okay to get stable shots. The ultrasonic motor for the lens ensures it’s fairly quick and not too loud. The buttons on the back are all a decent size and easy to operate.
Canon PowerShot SX30 IS: Performance
It’s only when you're getting a camera out in the field during the day you will get a good feel for how easy it using and how well it performs. So let’s say straight off, the camera exposes for the ground and unless you meter off something bordering the sky – like trees – then you risk getting a white sky. Shooting a sunlit (low on the horizon, not strong) landscape with a nice blue sky should be easy work for any digital camera, but the SX30 was a constant fight to retain the sky resulting in underexposed foregrounds. There is an i-Contrast option that brightens up shadows but this only works to a modest degree. Even so, it’s absolutely essential to use. All the metering modes were tried and even the evaluative ones weren’t fond of the sky.
There’s also an issue with colour fringing. Shooting dark objects against a white sky might be expected but objects against blue ones is particularly poor. Thankfully the lens stabilisation does a good job though invariably, at the long end of the zoom, more ISO is almost always needed.
Focussing, which is a key issue for this camera, is generally good. It’s not DSLR good, but it rarely had a problem with anything. There’s amount of options here, just moving the focus area slowly around, or using face detection. In fact, this is somewhat underwhelming as I would expect focus tracking as a minimum. Macro focussing at 0cm is commendable, but slightly misleading because the lens housing is fairly large so the front is some way from the CCD. More of an issue is avoiding shadows from the housing. But given along the optics, very handy.
Although there’s a sports scene mode, the burst mode of the SX30 is also fairly average. In a 10 second test it captured 7 hi-res images, so the touted frame rate of 0.6fps bore out. There’s also movies, but again, only at 1280x720, 30 fps, rather than full HD.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar