Introduction

Forgive us but this has been sort of a weak year for travel zoom cameras. It seems like most manufacturers are continuing to commit the "longer zoom equals better camera" fallacy, squeezing ever more ambitious lenses onto the same tiny bodies. Canon's most expensive travel zoom, the SX260 HS, posts one of the biggest numbers of all, with its huge 20x optical zoom ratio. But this model's CMOS image sensor tops out at only 12.1 megapixels, showing encouraging restraint on Canon's part. Could this be the camera to break the travel zoom segment's string of bad luck?