The Canon SX50 HS is a superzoom camera with a tiny sensor. It has an optical zoom of 50x that can go to 100x with the digital zoom. The equivalent for 35mm is 24mm to 1200mm going out to 2400mm with the digital zoom. Its sensor is only 1/30th the area of a full frame 35mm sensor so although it is advertised as a 12.1 megapixel camera, in reality it will only give about 4 megapixels of useful image data which will be difficult to achieve without artefacts when downsizing the image. 3 megapixels can be achieved by cropping the dimensions by 50%. Distortion and chromatic aberration is corrected by the camera electronics. The camera lens uses very good image stabilisation which is equivalent to about 5 stops at the telephoto end. This compares to cameras with in-body stabilisation that can at best manage 1 stop at the telephoto end. Because of this 5 stops of image stabilisation, a photographer can take hand-held shots of the moon beyond the 50x optical zoom limit, and get good detail of the moon's craters.

On the down-side, at long telephoto the camera is very slow to find its focus. Even for wide-angle shooting, the camera is slow to respond.

Its tiny sensor means you will never get anything approaching publishing quality out of this camera but if you are happy with 3 megapixels or less (much less at long telephoto) and take it on trips with you where sometimes very long telephoto is required without the need for bulky equipment, then this could be the ideal camera for you.