Canon Announces SX240 and SX260 Superzoom Compacts

With Panasonic's TZ cameras looking like they're back on the scene after last year's disappointing models, competition in the superzoom compact market has never been so tough. After its excellent 2011 models, Canon is back with two slightly upgraded cameras, the PowerShot SX240 HS and PowerShot SX260 HS.

The new cameras use the same sensor as the SX220/SX230, which is no bad thing, as this 12-Megapixel BSI CMOS gives very good results. In fact, Canon had found a great trade-off between noise and smoothing in last year's superzooms. The lens, however, is a new 25-500 mm model, confirming that zooms of around 20x are due to become the new standard this year.

The design has changed in a few subtle ways—for example, the bump housing the GPS in the SX230 has thankfully been removed, a bar has appeared on the front of the cameras to improve grip, and the screen has been switched back to 4:3 format (although it's still a 3-inch LCD with 460,000 dots).

UK pricing is still to be confirmed, but it'll be interesting to see whether these models will work out more or less expensive than Panasonic's upcoming Lumix TZ25 and TZ30.

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