Canon PowerShot SX730 HS

£380/$400 It’s a typical compact superzoom

Superzooms don’t come much more compact than the

Canon SX730 HS. It shaves a millimetre or so off the dimensions of the Panasonic TZ100 opposite, yet boasts a mighty 40x optical zoom range, equivalent to 24960mm, with digital zoom boost in reserve. ‘Intelligent’ image stabilization with both optical and sensor-shift components helps keep things steady.

The Canon’s 1/2.3-inch image sensor is much smaller than that of any camera in the group, and there’s no viewfinder. But the LCD screen is reasonably clear even in bright sunlight, and its 180-degree tilt facility is ideal for selfies.

Performance

Images are quite lacking in fine detail and can look pretty noisy too, even when taken under good lighting and ramping up the sensitivity from ISO 80 to just ISO 200. Autofocus is sluggish and, unlike all the other cameras on test, there are no options for raw image capture or selection of Adobe RGB colour space. It does have a massive zoom range, but the loss in quality from the small sensor is too high a price to pay.