topic Re: Is the SX60...broken? in Point & Shoot Digital Cameras

Is the SX60...broken?

Lee_Jay — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:09:47 GMT

I've seen numerous test and real-world shots from the SX60. Most look very soft, have halos around them, and generally have terrible image quality. But I've also seen a couple of very sharp shots. Now, Imaging Resource has given the SX50 the number 3 award for the hyperzoom category, over the SX60!

When I examine the SX60 shots at full telephoto, they don't look soft in the traditional sense of lens aberrations. They look out of focus. Is it possible that there's a firmware or hardware fault in the first batch of SX60's that make them focus innaccurately at the long end?

They are also very noisy, and the noise reduction used is very heavy-handed. However, it's hard to tell if it looks like that because the camera is over-sharpening the out-of-focus images and then smearing that detail, or if the lens is just soft and the sensor is just noisy.

It's hard for me to look at these shots and believe that this is the performance Canon intended, especially following the SX50, which is sharp as a tack at the long end.

Is there a recall, or a firmware update planned? As I said, there are some very sharp shots from the SX60 at the long end around, but they are pretty rare. It looks like, if there is a fault, it either does it most of the time, or it affects most of the cameras.

I'd love to have one. I have an SX50, and it's good, but for what I do, the horrible EVF and the lack of 60p are pretty serious penalties (I primarily use it for video on very fast objects). On paper, the SX60 fixes both problems, but it has created this new one, which I didn't expect given Canon's track record of releasing products that work properly.

Re: Is the SX60...broken?

Lee_Jay — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 16:55:56 GMT

Some other samples I've found lead me to think this is a problem of axial chromatic aberration, which is a shame because it's very hard to fix in software, usually not caused by a lens decentering issue, and because the SX50 has a remarkably low level of it (looks like around 1/10th as much).

Re: Is the SX60...broken?

Lee_Jay — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 19:00:16 GMT

I think I figured this out. I just tried an SX60 side-by-side with an SX50.

It's the stabilization.

The SX60 has a lot of high-frequency jitter at the long end.

The SX50 is rock solid.

Both cameras were in IS continuous mode 1.

I went back and forth several times to be sure, and I looked at them both at about the same magnification (100x and 104x using digital zoom). The difference was striking, and absolutely repeatable.

I wonder if Canon can fix this flaw via a firmware update, or not. But this is a pretty serious issue that makes the SX60 far less attractive than it could be without this flaw. Many people are not buying it because of its now well-known "poor image quality" which I think is mostly attributable to this one issue.