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Best Price A Review Of The Canon PowerShot HS SX40

Looking for a great, high-megapixel camera that will meet practically all of your everyday photography needs? Well, look no further than the Canon PowerShot HS SX40. This room looks great and you could mistake it for a D-SLR camera. What's really incredible about the SX40 HS 35 x zoom is its long range, coupled with that 12-megapixel camera resolution. Yes, you read that right-a 35 x zoom range-which translates to a very powerful camera with telephoto reach. Read on and find out more about it.

1. Design and Construction
What does the SX40 HS look like? Well, as you can see from the picture, the unit itself is neither compact nor light. Its dimensions are 3.6 by 4.8 by 4.2 inches (HWD) and it weighs in at 1.3pounds. It's competitor, the Nikon Coolpix P500 is slimmer and lighter by comparison.

The Canon PowerShot SX40 HS comes with a metal body with a few plastic elements. I like the fact that there's a very deep handgrip provides comfort when holding which lets you hold the camera firmly. Throw in the SX40 's optical stabilization system and it means you can get a sharp photo at the extreme end of its zoom range. I tried zooming almost 35 x on the SX40 HS, without a tripod or monopod, and my pictures still came out pretty good and sharp.

Canon Camera

2. Optics and Resolution
When it comes to long range zoom, very few non-digital SLR type cameras can match the Canon PowerShot HS SX40. The 35 x zoom range is better than many digital SLRs equipped with telephoto lenses and is certainlyone of the selling points of the room.

With its 12 megapixel resolution, you'd expect that photos taken with the SX40 HS to be exceptionally sharp. Incidentally, I got to know about the Imatest software suite-which can be used to measure cameras' performance in terms of image sharpness and noise. So here's what I did-to evaluate sharpness, I shot several photos of a test chart and analyzed them using a center-weighted algorithm. The sale averaged 1.836 SX40 HS lines per picture height, which surpasses the 1.800-line benchmarks that qualifies an image as being acceptably sharp.

I've tried many cameras in the past, including the Kodak EasyShare Z990 Max 30 x zoom which packs in lens, records a slightly higher 1.946 lines. So in terms of image sharpness, theSX40 HS is not the best-but I think its other features more than make up for that.

3. User Controls
Many cameras have very obscure or weird control placements. The Canon PowerShot SX40 HS doesn't have this problem. There are ample control buttons on the SX40 's body-a top-mounted dial lets you change between shooting modes, and there's a neat rear four-way jog wheel to scroll through menus, adjust exposure compensation, ISO set, activate the self-timer, and so forth.

The Canon designers obviously got the design of the correct system menu. In fact, the Canon HS system menu SX40 is one of the best I've seen around-comparable even to the top end DSLR cameras. You can quickly access most of the common controls you'd encounterin a digital camera, without having to click all around the menu after menu. I also like the fact that the SX40 's pop-up flash is manually operated. All I need to do is flip it up when you'd like to use it. Enthusiasts who want a better flash can fit into units like the Canon Speedlite flash, using the dedicated hot shoe.

4. Battery Life
The Canon PowerShot SX40 boasts a very good and long lasting battery life. I could be outdoors shooting photos like no one's business and the battery would still be OK. This contrasts strongly to some of the older Canon cameras I have, where the battery just dies on you when you're lining up for a very important shot.

5. Storage and Transfer
OK, the Canon PowerShot HS SX40supports all manner of media cards-Secure Digital, Secure Digital High Capacity and Secure Digital Extended Capacity. The camera records 1080p24 video QuickTime-which in my opinion, looks quite good. To copy photos and videos into your PC, you can plug the camera into your computer via USB-mini to copy the files. Alternatively, you can connect the camera to an HDTV via mini HDMI. My family loves to do that-plug a digital camera to a huge TV and enjoy the photos and videos.

6. Shortcomings
I feel that the Canon PowerShot SX40 HS is a great camera -but it falls short in a few areas. For one thing, the room isn't cheap! And although it has a powerful 35 x zoom lenses, I could tell that it's low performancelight is not so good-especially compared to its competitors like the Nikon Coolpix P500, which captures clean images in as little as one quarter the light as the SX40.

Conclusion
All in all, the Canon PowerShot SX40 HS is a great room with a powerful 35 x zoom range. It has a host of innovative features which allow you to take picture after picture with ease. The quality of the photo shots are way above average and is certainly one of the better digital cameras in its class. Do check it out!