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I'm considering to buy a camera such as one in the Sony NEX or Samsung NX series. Do you know which of the 2 series has a lens that is equivalent to the Sony DSC HX200V's 30x optical zoom (Focal length equiv. = 27 – 810mm)? And what is the lens's name? Thank you.

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  • While you cannot get a 35mm APSC lens with zoom ratio as great as that of the "superzoom" you can crop the image of the APSC camera at full zoom to increase the effective zoom range to very comfortable above that of the superzoom.

  • This is because the APSC sensor is more than 12 times the area of the superzoom's sensor, so using say 1/4 of the sensor area for an effective increase of 2:1 in the maximum focal length will still return superior noise results to that obtained from the superzoom.

  • By cropping an eg NEX-5 image to 1/4 area you reduce pixels from 14 mp to about 3.5mp BUT can still expect superior image results to that obtained from a superzoom at maximum focal length.

Samsung D-Xenon 18-250mm F3.5-6.3 is probably as wide as you can reasonably get for the Samsung. Similar for the NEX. 18-300mm is available with an A-mount adaptor.

BUT, on an APSC camera, if you crop a portion of the image that is 50% of the width and 50% of the height = 25% of the area you get the effect of a 2X increase in focal length.
To "match the 810/27 = 30:1 ration of a HX200V superzoom you need to increase from 300/18 = 16.666:1 to 30:1 = a factor of 30/16.666 = 1.8:1 more.
SO by using the full image at 18mm and 1/4 of the image at 300mm you more than exceed the effective zoom range of the HX200V's 30:1.
AND this is valid because the APSC sensor is about 23.4mm x 15.6 mm specification here while the HX200V's sensor is 6.17 mm x 4.55mm specification here. After cropping the APSC image to 1/4 the rea you still have a sensor size of 11.7mm x 7.8mm or more than 3 times the area of the "superzoom".

While available sensor area is not an absolute measure of performance it is liable to be a very good indication that the APSC cameras will offer greater effective zoom ratio when using a 18mm-300mm lens than the "superzoom" does.

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If you want native lenses, where you don't need an adaptor, the biggest super zoom lenses for both mounts are from 18-200mm (35mm equivalent: 27-300mm):

Sony E mount (NEX)

  • Sony E 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 OSS
  • Sony E 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 OSS LE (lighter and shorter, then the non LE)
  • Tamron 18-200mm 3.5-6.3 Di III VC

Samsung NX mount

  • Samsung NX 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 ED OIS i-Function
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