It has its limitations, but the Canon PowerShot SX500 IS is a good choice for zoom addicts on a budget. If you pop the flash up and press the flash button, you can then press menu to enter a flash menu section.

The in-camera menu follows the same layout as found in other Canon compacts, and even if you haven’t used a Canon in the past general navigation is pretty simple. Also, Canon put a framing assist button on the lens barrel that pulls the lens back so you can find your subjects should they go out of frame. Speaking of things that use up your battery, the camera's flash does not pop up on its own, you have to lift it. There’s no Raw image capture though, which means the SX500 is strictly JPEG only – you do get a choice of resolution settings, however, should you be looking to conserve space on your memory card, or if you’re just shooting non-critical snapshots destined solely for the internet. The shutter release button is located just in front of the main on/off button and is traditional, is surrounded by the zoom control rocker switch.Colours could be better but they're close enough to realistic so we don't really have anything to complain about. It means that if you have a Canon printer, you don't necessarily need a Canon camera to direct print. The optical focal length is 30x on the Canon PowerShot SX500 IS but on top of the 30x, you can boost the zoom to 60x using ZoomPlus. For outdoor photos and video of stationary or slow-moving subjects -- close or distant -- it should satisfy. Also, you may notice some vertical smear when shooting bright light sources, such as the purple streak on the left side of the screen grab above.

As you switch the Canon PowerShot SX500 IS on, the lens will poke out by around 1cm and get much longer as the camera zooms in. Neither is particularly fast, although given the engineering constraints incurred by cramming such a large focal range into such a small optic, this isn’t wholly unexpected. While it’s undoubtedly a clever function, we can’t but help feel that either a simple zoom lever or a manually operated zoom barrel might work better. This is a deal breaker for some people, though with its large 3-inch LCD that gets bright enough to see in daylight it's a little easier to forgive.Until we're finished refining our procedures, we will not be posting comparative performance charts. According to ISO 12232:2006 (20th April 2006) which specifies the method for assigning and reporting ISO speed ratings for digital still cameras.