Canon PowerShot SX60 HS Review - With a 65x optical zoom, the SX60 HS stands out from the superzoom crowd as one of the best specified compacts on the market. Audley Jarvis gets his hands on the SX60 HS to find out how it performs.
Canon PowerShot SX60 HS Review
Canon PowerShot SX60 HS Review – Performance
Canon PowerShot SX60 HS
On the whole, performance is a bit of a mixed bag. Start-up time is ok, with the camera going from off to ready to shoot in around two seconds. The optical zoom travels smoothly – if a little noisily – through its range, taking a fraction over two seconds to extend or compress from one focal extreme to the other.
Continuous shooting has been given a much-needed boost to a maximum 6.4fps in AF-S mode, although this drops to 3.4fps with continuous AF enabled. Switching from JPEG to RAW capture decreases continuous shooting performance quite markedly though, with the camera only able to shoot at around 2fps.
Canon PowerShot SX60 HS battery
In terms of battery life, we were able to shoot just over 300 images and a handful of short movies on a full charge.
By far the biggest issue with the SX60 HS is its sluggish AF performance. Shooting outdoors in bright conditions AF speed isn’t too bad, with the camera generally acquiring focus in under a second. However, once light levels drop below optimal, the SX60 HS’s contrast-detect AF system quickly begins to slow.
In poor light, we found it could take in excess of 1.5 seconds to lock on, while in really poor light it struggles to find focus at all. We certainly wouldn’t want to rely on the SX60 HS to capture fleeting, candid moments when light is in short supply.