Harsh because I've taken this camera through miles and miles of Costa Rican cloudforest, AND falling snow in Canadian rainforest. I've taken pictures of birds, which is my main interest; and I've taken scenics and closeups. This review is not about showing off my pictures, though. It is about the camera.
I used Pentax Spotmatics, two of them together, in the 1970s. Those were the original screw-mount Spotmatics, with no numbers or letters following that one-word model name. I knew all about photography as it was then, when I was in my 20s and 30s working as a naturalist in the Canadian Rockies for Parks Canada.
Now I'm 67. My Tico friends in Costa Rica, many of them naturalist-guides in the Monteverde Reserve, are half my age. They are the best friends I've ever had the priviledge of knowing, and I go to Costa Rica for months at a time and haunt the wet, humid trails of Monteverde and other places. For three months in 2013, my Canon SX50 was with me, doing just that, pretty much every day.
It rains suddenly there, and there is a very chilly mist that moves sideways. It can be really cold. The forest is beautiful on its own spiritual terms. It's not a zoo, and you don't see much wildlife unless you are willing to meet it on its own terms. I suppose one of the main comments tourists make is that they "haven't seen much" in the rainforest. Everything is there, but it does not live according to tourism schedules.
So I just walk and walk and walk, usually alone. I love walking. I walk silently when I wish to do so, and I often walk "so slowly I go backwards". That's true; I walk 50 feet and stop and just stand there, and then I go back 100 metres and stand there; I sometimes take several hours to walk a section of trail I could walk in 20 minutes. But there is no reason to hurry when you stand in a cathedral.
And so: what about the camera? My Canon SX50HS verified all I've told you. I raised its lens into the mists and the rain, and I tried endlessly to wipe the lens and the lens barrel dry with proper lens cloths and with my T-shirt and with tissue paper. I had a mini flower lens hood, a tiny little toy-like thing, screwed onto the lens. From Amazon, it cost about the same as a coffee or two. I never used the stock lens cover; eventually I didn't even carry it.
I did carry 5 batteries, Amazonians; and a 128GB SDXC card in the camera. Yes, I had more batteries at home. Five charged batteries with me, and no complaints: these batteries are good for a lot of pictures per charge. I often returned home on my fourth battery, though.
The camera lens misted up on me half a dozen times in several months. You'd see it and know it immediately; there it was, like a cloud blurring your pictures. Photos were effectively impossible. My poor camera! But, twenty minutes later, every time, I'd be taking pictures again. Being fog-UNproof, the camera UNfogged as easily as it fogged. Every time, thank goodness. I felt somewhat guilty, subjecting my loyal digital companion to these conditions. I'm leaving out Chomes, a hot and sticky Pacific coast place shared by shrimps, a very few tough bird-watchers, and mosquitoes of Dengue persuasion. My camera fogged up there, too, in bright hot sunshine. And the camera unfogged itself there, too. Thank goodness, because my Double-striped Thick-knee photos were otherwise not going to happen at all.
What about that tiny tiny sensor, one-seventh the size of a DSLR's sensor? Well, that was a big surprise. Of course, my cameras of the 1970s had sensors twice the size of DSLRs, in the way of 35mm Kodachrome II 25-ASA film. Yet DSLR folk sometimes scorned the teensy sensor behind my 1200mm-equivalent telephoto reach in my Canon. The sensor was a joke, they sometimes said.
In all those miles in the forests in the rain, I did not have problems with light. Of course, photography IS light-graphics, practically applied. Physics is unforgiving. It just turned out, on an everyday, real-life, being-there, practical reality, that the sensor did its job magnificently. Had I known nothing of sensors, I'd have never known I was using a "much too small" sensor. I was really surprised, myself. The sensor is not too small. On paper it looks that way; in the dim rainy light of the cloudforest, the sensor performs beautifully.
I took a couple of weeks to leave Costa Rica in December 2013, so that I happened to be in 80 degrees and up to 90 degrees in Heredia a week before I was in freezing temperature in Vancouver. And there was snow in Vancouver. Snow sticking to my lens and to my lens barrel as I took photos in Stanley Park. The pictures were during the actual snowFALL. My poor camera! Snow is worse than rain, because you just can't keep it off your equipment when you are aiming UP.
The camera lens fogged up. And, fifteen minutes later in the same conditions, it unfogged. Thank goodness, because my Barrow's Goldeneye photos were otherwise not going to happen at all.
You see why I call this camera "loyal". The camera-rights people would be after my hide. But I swear no camera was hurt during these exposures in evil conditions.
Against the Canon: The base of my right thumb accidentally presses camera buttons and I've lost maybe a hundred or two hundred good bird pictures because at the critical split-second, the camera gets hung up about whether I want a 2- or 10-second shutter delay, or my preference in image ratios. It's not my thumb's fault. This is ergonomics; the solution (listen, please, Mr. Canon) is a button to kill those buttons from working, as on most cell-phones. In these cobditions, Auto-whatever will do: speed is everything. Well, speed and telephoto reach. Your bird is a moving 6-inch object in the dark depths of tree branches, and you have 1.3 seconds in which to take his portrait.
No, I didn't use a tripod. I had both a tripod and a monopod with me. Even a monopod was too slow. I took many videos and thousands of stills. Everything was hand-held, even though I had really WANTED to use my monopod, at least; or my tripod. Nope. Just say Nope.
What else? I mentioned AUTO just now. Yes, I know about f-stops and slave flashes and all that good stuff. But you just don't have TIME. Not in the reality of the rainy forests. You are "grabbing" your shots. You press that shutter button NOW, because we are getting precariously close to the end of our 1.3-second chance. Well, just to illustrate my point. It's not always 1.3 seconds; I'm just making a point. No, it's often maybe half that length of time.
Videos are often better than stills. A still shot, even in a series, may show the bird as he turns his head. A video sees that motion as an advantage. Plus, birds sing and chirp and videos do too. I generally made one snapshot the moment I had the bird in the lens; then a video. Always using the eyepiece; not the monitor screen.
The Canon SX50 lived through these experiences, and so did I. I've owned this camera more than a year now. My computer system has storage for a dozen terrabytes; I'd better add a fifth external hard drive.
Yes, buy this camera if you relate to my perils in paradise. I would like to see 60p (like Sony has) and I'd like to see an anti-thumb protection as I suggested. After all this, however, I rate the Canon SX50HS at 10 out of 10. Mas o menos. In real life. And in our 13th month of intimate cohabitation.
