Ultrazoom

The ability to take a close-up from far away is kind of thrilling, whether it's catching someone's facial expression from across the room, a key play from your bleacher seat or a roaring lion from the safety of your car at the safari park. And you don't need one of those enormous bazooka-size lenses you see along the sidelines at a football game to get up close and personal; compact ultrazooms deliver amazing flexibility with a weight that won't break your back, and a price that won't break the bank.

Why the tremendous size difference between big-zoom power for an SLR and a point-and-shoot? It's the size of the image sensor. Illuminating an SLR sensor requires a much larger lens than the relatively small image sensor in a point-and-shoot, meaning more expertly shaped glass and and heftier mechanical systems to maintain precise control.

The ultrazoom category basically breaks down into two sub-categories: the 20x and up group, which look like miniature SLRs, and the more pocket-friendly compact ultrazoom group with lenses in the 10x-12x range.. And just to be sure we're all on the same page, we're speaking strictly about optical zoom here, not digital zoom. Digital zoom is a mathematical rather than mechanical enlargement, and inevitably cuts down on the quality of your photo. It lets camera marketers claim unbelievable telephoto capabilities, but it's a feature you want to leave disabled if you care about image sharpness.

20x and Up
Cameras in this class have zoom power that ranges from 20x up to the current telephoto leader, the Olympus SP-590UZ, with an amazing 26x zoom lens that's equivalent to a 26mm - 676mm on a 35mm camera.

As mentioned above, these cameras are nearly the size and shape of a compact SLR, weighing in at about a pound give or take, measuring roughly roughly five inches wide and just under four inches deep. They offer both an LCD for composing shots and an electronic viewfinder (basically a tiny LCD screen you hold up to your eye). The viewfinder is easier to see than the LCD when shooting on sunny days, and a handheld long-zoom shot often works out better if the camera is steadied against your face.

Some models have hinged LCDs that pivot away from the camera body, and then rotate up and down, providing a lot of flexibility when looking for unusual shooting angles. We find these articulated screens (such as the one on the Canon SX1 IS) particularly handy when shooting with a high-powered ultrazoom: the wider grip with LCD extended helps steady the camera. These high-powered ultrazooms usually offer extensive manual controls, including the kind of exposure flexibility and white balance adjustment usually associated with SLR photography.

Long-range ultrazooms are often powered by AA batteries, which is fine with us. Not that we're big on throwing used alkalines into landfills, but for $20 you can buy a set or rechargeable AAs with charger, and still have the freedom to use off-the-shelf AAs if your camera runs out of juice while traveling.
 
Compact Ultrazooms
These cameras aren't much bigger than a run-of-the-mill compact with 3x lenses, but they offer zooms in the 10x to 12x range (you could arguably include 7x zoom models in this group as well). Unlike the more high-powered ultrazooms, these compacts (such as the Samsung HZ15W) generally provide more limited manual controls, smaller LCDs without the hinged mounting, and run on proprietary rechargeable batteries. They also tend to have slower shot-to-shot speeds when shooting continuously.

Key Features
- Image Stabilization: Effective image stabilization is a major consideration when choosing an ultrazoom camera, particularly if you want to shoot without a tripod (and you know that you do). There's really nothing in the camera specs that tells you how well the image stabilization system will work, but we've developed a systematic test procedure for our reviews.

- Wide-angle Coverage: Yes, the primary reason for choosing an ultrazoom is that distant shot, but that doesn't mean you won't want to shoot landscapes, or indoor group shots with the same camera, and those require wide-angle capability. The width of coverage is indicated by the smaller number in the lens' zoom range: the smaller the number, the wider the angle. Figure a 28mm equivalent or better gives the camera a wide-angle advantage.

- High ISO: We measure a camera's light sensitivity as an ISO number: a higher figure means it's more sensitive to light, allowing you to shoot in darker environments without flash, and equally important for ultrazooms, raise the shutter speed to help reduce blur caused by camera movement. The trick here is that the higher the ISO, the more image noise will appear in your photo. For some cameras, the apparently desirable higher setting yields photos so speckled and littered with imperfections that they're just not usable. Our image noise tests (complete with sample images) reveal the maximum practical ISO speeds for each camera reviewed.