If you want to be silly about it then yes every AF camera has a spot or frame that it to uses for focussing - even if the entire frame was one huge frame/spot LOL :-O:-O:-O Perhaps you would have been happier the the poster that asked about having spot focus had asked if it had auto focus instead. I thought if you had a 7D you would understand what is meant by spot focus - obviously not
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No, I don't have a 7D, nor an SX50, but I've looked in the 7D manual and I do see they use the term "Spot AF", which isn't mentioned in the SX50 manual. By that definition, you're correct - the SX50 does not have what Canon call spot focusing.
But my ancient Panasonic FZ30 manual does, even though the "spot" isn't as small as the 7D's. I.e. it depends on your definition of "spot focus". The SX50 definitely has something that corresponds to what others have been calling "spot focus" for a long time. Are these suddenly now not spot focus now that the 7D has a spot focus that's superior?
As far as the longer focal length goes to enlarge any gaps, you will find the longest actual focal length is just 215mm !!!!! (the so called 35mm equivalent is got at by the crop factor because of the tiny sensor and is better described as equivalent field of view IMO).
Sloppy of me not to call it "equivalent focal length."
Although you may think that the longer 'reach'!! could help with precision focussing then the size of the single focusing frame would more than cancels that out - being a SX50 owner (I assume) you must know it is enormous compared with a DSLR AF spot.
I'm not talking about the precision of focusing, just the ability of the user to get the camera to attempt to focus on the desired object, although that does translate into very poor focusing if one can't get it to do it. It doesn't matter how one gets that focus area to fit between the branches, whether it's by having a sensor so small that the image is large in the viewfinder, or by having a longer lens, or by having a very small AF area, so long as it fits.
The SX50 does better in this regard than similar cameras with shorter focal lengths and similar size AF areas simply because the gaps are bigger in relation to the AF area. You could achieve a similar effect with digital zoom, but the contrast detection might not work so well.
By your reasoning you are indicating that a Canon 1.6 crop camera must be better at precision focussing than any full frame model (or even the 1D3/4 1.3 croppers) e.g. the extra reach because of the crop factor will but bigger gaps in the vegetation LOL
I've had to think hard about that. If you view the same scene from the same distance with the same true focal length lens, but cropped, you'd think you'd achieve nothing. But the viewfinder would be the same physical size, and the AF area would be the same size in relation to it, yet the cropped view still fills it. Therefore the scene must now be larger in relation to the AF area, so yes, it should fit between the gaps better.
(This might not hold true for optical viewfinders, so let's assume we're only talking about EVFs, which most of those types of cameras don't have, which makes the discussion theoretical only.)
But in reality, if you're swapping between cameras of those types, the AF areas are likely to differ anyway, so the comparison might fail.
What I'm really getting at is better illustrated with a different comparison - an interchangeable lens camera with a 600mm lens vs the same camera with a 1200mm lens. In the latter case the AF area will fit between more gaps. I found this to be very true when I fitted a 1.7x converter to my Canon S3 to take it from 430mm (equiv) to 720mm. It just worked better, and I suspect this is the effect SX50 owners are experiencing when they use full zoom.
Probably best not to compare 7D focusing ability to the SX50's. There may be other factors coming into play like software and camera intelligence.
