The image above was taken with the Nikon COOLPIX P520. The camera was set to Aperture priority mode and f4.2 was selected as this produced the best result from the lens. If you’re wondering why f4.2 and not f4, at its 24mm wide angle setting, the COOLPIX P520 has a maximum aperture of f3 and in Aperture priority mode increments in 1/3EV steps. It’s therefore not possible to set f4 and the closest alternative is f4.2. At f4, the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72 selected an exposure of 1/640 at 100 ISO and the Powershot SX50 HS metered 1/500 at f4 and 80 ISO. The COOLPIX P520 was mounted on a tripod and image stabilisation was disabled. As usual for this test, the cameras were otherwise left on the default settings.

The detail in the first crop from the COOLPIX P520 is a little indistinct and fuzzy. You can make out medium sized detail quite well, like the people standing outside the chapel and at the bottom of the hill, but the finer detail is obscured and the edges of the chapel and surrounding wall are quite soft. The second crop also looks a little bit soft, you can see the white column of the lighthouse is reasonably cleanly defined, but the chimneys and window frames in the foreground aren’t as crisply defined as they might be and there’s missing detail in the roof tiles where you’d expect to see it.

There’s some distortion in the third crop from the edge of the frame and the detail here is softer than in the first two crops. But in the fourth crop the level of detail is greatly improved; the finer detail is much clearer and the edges are a lot cleaner. Overall this isn’t a bad result from the COOLPIX P520, in the middle of the frame the lens performs well and the sensor is able to record a good level of detail with nice clean edges, but toward the edges the slight softness of the lens combined with visible noise is taking the edge off its performance.

One thing to bear in mind is that, unlike the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72 and PowerShot SX50 HS, the COOLPIX P520 lacks a RAW mode, so doing your own processing to try and squeeze mode detail from the sensor isn’t an option. Instead, you could try increasing the sharpness and/or contrast, but at the risk of exaggerating the noise.

Compared with the crops from the Nikon COOLPIX P520 the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72 crops show a slightly larger area with smaller details as the COOLPIX P520 has a higher resolution 18 Megapixel sensor. But the COOLPIX P520 crops don’t show any more detail than those from the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72, and in fact the first crop from the COOLPIX P520 looks a little softer, particularly the grassy area in the foreground.The second row of crops looks very similar, but at the edge of the frame the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72’s lens appears to have a slight advantage over the COOLPIX P520’s which looks a little more distorted and blurred. Remember, the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72 is zoomed in a little from its maximum 20mm wide angle here, whereas both the COOLPIX P520 and PowerShot SX50 HS are right up against their wide angle limit. In the fourth crop taken from near the middle of the frame the tables are turned though, and the lens and sensor combination on the COOLPIX P520 produces a slightly sharper result with marginally more detail. It’s a small margin though and generally, there isn’t a great deal of difference between these two models at the wide angle end of the range.

The crops from the 12 Megapixel Canon PowerShot SX50 HS show a larger area with smaller detail than either the 16 Megapixel Lumix FZ70 / FZ72 or the 18 Megapixel COOLPIX P520. They’re also sharper and more detailed. In all of the PowerShot SX50 HS crops edges are more crisply defined and you can make out finer detail, in the chapel stonework of the first crop, The lighthouse and foreground roofs in the second, the less distorted sharper detail of the window, tile and brickwork at the frame edge and pretty much everywhere in the final crop. The SX50 HS’s sensor and lens outperform the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72 at this focal length.

Further down the page, I’ve compared results at the mid-range focal length and the maximum telephoto, so read on to see how these three models compare when zoomed in. Alternatively, see how they compare at higher sensitivities in my Nikon COOLPIX P520 Noise results.

To compare noise levels under real-life conditions, I shot this scene with the Nikon COOLPIX P520, the Panasonic Lumix FZ70 / FZ72, and the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS within a few moments of each other using their best quality JPEG settings at each of their ISO sensitivity settings.

The COOLPIX P520 and PowerShot SX50 HS were set to their 24mm equivalent maximum wide angle and the Lumix FZ70 / FZ72 was zoomed in to 24mm to provide the same field of view.

The cameras were set to Aperture Priority exposure mode with the ISO sensitivity set manually.