Ultra-Zoom Digital Camera Review

About long-zoom cameras

While most compact digital cameras have 3x to 5x zoom lenses, ultra-zoom or extended-zoom digital cameras offer up to 26x optical zoom for taking close-up shots of faraway subjects.

This report covers ultra-zoom cameras with 10x zoom or greater. If you prefer a camera that's more lightweight and compact, our report on digital cameras includes models with 3x to 8x zoom lenses. Possibly the most direct alternative to an ultra-zoom camera is a digital SLR. These can accept accessory zoom lenses, but cost a lot more and are for serious or professional photographers.

Photography sites offer the most exhaustive testing and credible reviews, although they vary in presentation, technical language and site accessibility. Some of the more popular sites include Imaging-Resource.com, DCResource.com, DigitalCameraInfo.com, DPReview.com and Steves-Digicams.com. These experts give special attention to shutter speed and shooting performance, since ultra-zooms tend to be slower than regular digital cameras and digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras. They also consider features for shooting the best long-zoom photos, such as image-stabilization technology.

Consumer electronics sites like CNET, PCMag.com, Laptop Magazine and PC World also evaluate digital cameras. The reviews are less thorough, but still test and evaluate key performance features. Popular consumer advocate publications such as ConsumerReports.org, J.D. Power and Associates, Choice magazine, Which? magazine and TrustedReviews.com have large-scale digital camera reports. While these sources comparatively test and evaluate models and provide easy-to-use rating categories, none have detailed writeups on individual cameras. Rounding out our sources are user reviews from CNET and Amazon.com, which help to reveal potential problems with daily and long-term use.