Canon PowerShot SX60 HS – EVF

The Canon SX60 HS offers an EVF with 100 per cent coverage, and it’s a huge improvement over the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS‘s EVF, which was pretty dreadful.

Resolution has been boosted from 202k dots to 922k dots. It’s a big upgrade. However, we’re still in territory that’s less than optimal: you do need more than this to get an EVF looking like anything but a bad impersonation of an optical viewfinder.

Detail is fair, but slightly lacking, and colours are oversaturated, making it a less-than-perfect judge of your photos. The SX60’s EVF performance also takes a dive when used in low-light conditions.

It starts becoming juddery when there’s less light to work with. And even at the best of times it feels more like an emergency tool than something you’ll want to head straight to.

We also found the lack of a proximity sensor on the Canon SX60 HS a shame. It would enable the camera to switch automatically from the LCD to the EVF when an eye is put to the EVF. Instead, you have to toggle between the two manually, which feels a bit old-school.

Canon PowerShot SX60 HS – Screen

The rear screen is less problematic. It’s a 921k-dot 3-inch LCD, which is a pretty standard setup for a camera, high-end or otherwise. You don’t get touchscreen operation, though, meaning control is limited to the button layout on the rear plate.

While we don’t think touchscreens are a must-have camera feature, one would have been handy here, as we found the D-pad on the back a bit fiddly. It’s small and sits almost flush with the body, which does no-one any favours.

The SX60 HS has a vari-angle display, mind. Pivoting out on an arm and twisting, it’s a good deal more flexible than most non-superzoom displays, although such a mechanism is fairly common in this class.

Canon PowerShot SX60 HS – Features

Battery performance seems to have been marginally improved in the Canon SX60 HS, but not to a particularly exciting extent. We got around 300 shots and a few short videos out of a charge – still less than you might hope to get out of a Panasonic rival such as the DMC-FZ200.

As the Canon SX60 HS arrives a good while after its predecessor, the SX50 HS – two full years – the new model predictably bungs in some extra connectivity features. You now get Wi-Fi and NFC for wireless file transfers and remote shutter control.