Upgrade from Sony HX-300 ? (1 Viewer)

I have a Sony HX-300 bridge camera which overall has served me well with it's 50x zoom.

However, I find it very frustrating when the camera doesn't auto focus properly, especially in low light (as an example, see the attached photo of a treecreeper taken early on a winter morning)

I am therefore thinking about upgrading to something better, and am wondering what people would recommend in terms of bridge cameras. My budget is £1,000 max

The Nikon P950 (maybe 750 GBP) and P1000 are two super-zooms (2000mm and 3000mm respectively). There are very long threads on them in the Nikon section. I have only used the older P900. The P1000 is noticeably bigger than the P950, but I have not used either so cannot give you the point-by-point on them. They have both been well received.

I think people also like the Panasonic FZ80, which goes out to 1200mm but is more compact.

The Sony RX-10 III is a nice camera but only goes out to 600mm. it has a bigger sensors though. I tried it for a few days, but was not really impressed with the handling, coming from DSLRs. But it's likely a big step up from a point-and-shoot.

I have usually found that cropping more than a little on these types of cameras does not come out as well as just having more zoom. So if you need the reach, the FZ80, P950, or P1000 would likely be the ticket.

Here are some related threads that I remembered, but I'm sure there's more that I don't have a direct reference to.

• P950: https://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=385308
• P1000: https://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=364634
• FZ80: https://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=390007

Marc