Saturday, July 19, 2014

When it comes to moonshots, the Canon SX50HS is very much smarter than the HS50EXR.


I also have the Canon SX50HS superzoom camera. It has an opptional 4x digital zoom setting so the zoom range can go up to 200 times instead of the maximum 50 times optical zoom. That is so much powerful than the the HS50EXR camera which with 42 times optical zoom and 2 times digital zoom can go up to only 84 times maximum.

Now you might think that the digital zoom feature of the canon would give it a useless grainy look. Yet this light camera can display the craters of the moon. See photos in our other blogs. (Link will be provided later). This shows that Canon has a high IQ (image quality)

But the amazing thing about the Canon is that it can take moon photos without any manual settings! Compare this with the Fujifilm HS50EXR. Shooting the moon in Auto mode will give us a glaring white object. We have to manually adjust the settings.

Here are some photos taken last July 13, a Sunday with the mon past the fullmoon phase.


The above shot was obtained with 1s0 400, 1/2 seconds, f4.5. Here is what we obtain with the auto mode setting for which the camera selected 1/20 s, f5.6, iso 400. 0 EV.




Much better is the following photo, this time taken with 1/100s, iso 100 and camera automatically selecting the fstop opening to f5.6, .

Now unless you align the lens with the subject, you might obtain a lens flare, a fairly common problem with Fujifilm cameras.


The metering system of the camera is fooled by the darkness of the background and the brightness of the single moon. It overexposes so set camera manually to shutter priority mode, use the following starting values: low ISO 100 value and 1/100s shutter speed and experiment.

A major change: a new blog name

Our Me and My Hs25exr camera was just renamed Me and My HS50EXR mirroring the fact that we are not using our waterlogged and unusable old hs25exr camera and instead we are using the SX50EXR as its replacement.

Boasting a 42x maximum optical zoom, this camera will hopefully provide a long service life for general photography.

A bad thing about the rubber strips of the HS50EXR in a tropical country.


Before I lost my HS25EXR due to water entering the camera last year, I experience the leader strips at the front and back of the camera coming off due to loosened adhesion of the white glue used by Fujifilm.

Now that I have the HS50EXR camera I was expecting a more solid higher quality workmanship and better materials. Instead the leather strip at the back of the camera loosened again from frequent use. The white glue is simply of poor quality. One can blame the heat and humidity of a tropical country, but we suggest Fujifilm do away with the fake leather strip to provide friction and instead texturize the plastic casing to provide non-slip grip on the back of the camera.

My Canon SX50HS camera simply does not suffer from this problem because it does not use leather strips for added grip. It does feel and look cheap however.