The Canon PowerShot SX50 HS

What you should know: 
For the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS, the lens basically tells its whole story: a 50x zoom that goes from 24mm to 1,200mm.

That's an extraordinary range that is quite capable of pulling into frame something miles away and snapping a shot. Or capturing wildlife from afar. Or helping your neighbors find their car keys inside their house from inside your house. OK, that last one's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea. And while you'll want to use a tripod for the sharpest results, Canon's optical image stabilization is excellent, allowing you to use the zoom with the camera held only in your hands.
What it offers: 
If you simply must have the longest zoom in the room, the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS satisfies.
The advantage: 
The Canon PowerShot SX50 HS has an extraordinary zoom range with excellent image stabilization and fine photo quality for a megazoom; plenty of shooting modes, from full auto to full manual; raw image capture; and a hot shoe for adding an external flash.
The unfavorable: 
Its lens and high ISO picture quality make it less desirable for shooting indoors or in low light, especially without a tripod. A couple of things about the design of the controls might make shooting frustrating for some users. Outside of its long lens, its features and performance are slightly behind competing models.
The price:
$375.00 to $449.99

The Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM

What you should know: 
The 17-55mm lens maintains an f/2.8 aperture throughout its entire zoom range—capturing four times the light as the standard 18-55mm lens when zoomed all the way in. Gathering this much light requires a substantial amount of glass—the lens is 4.4 by 3.3 inches (HD) in size, weighs 1.4 pounds, and uses relatively large 77mm filters. The front element doesn't rotate when zooming or focusing, so using a polarizing filter to eliminate reflections is possible, and the lens does include a hood to help reduce flare.
Canon EF-S lenses cannot be mounted to full-frame cameras, so you won't be able to take this lens with you if you decide to upgrade to a EOS 5D Mark III $2,679.00 at 42nd Street Photo—this is one area where Nikon has an edge, as its full-frame lineup can use APS-C lenses at a reduced resolution in a special crop mode.

What it offers: 
If you're looking to upgrade your 18-55mm kit lens, the Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM is a good, but expensive, way to go.

The advantage: 
Very sharp at wider angles. Fast aperture. Minimal distortion.

The unfavorable: 
Big. Expensive. Soft at 55mm.

The price:
$1179.99

Source

The Canon PowerShot G15

What you should know: 
The G15 improves a bit on the G12's performance, though still not enough to consider it "fast." It takes about 2.3 seconds to power on, focus, and shoot, which is relatively typical for this type of camera. The biggest boost is in bright-light autofocus, bringing its shot lag down to 0.2 second; in dim light it remains relatively unchanged at 0.6 second. Image processing remains its weak point, though once again it's not notably slower than most of its competitors: two sequential JPEGs take about 1.9 seconds, rising to 2.6 seconds for raw and 2.9 with flash enabled.
The G15 maintains the line's excellent photo quality, although it still doesn't quite match that of Sony's RX100.

What it offers: 
The Canon PowerShot G15 continues the G-series tradition of solid advanced compacts, but doesn't rank as best in class by any particular measure.

The advantage: 
In addition to a great, fast lens, the Canon PowerShot G15 has a nice, streamlined shooting design and produces very nice photos.

The unfavorable: 
It's humbled by a somewhat limited feature set and ho-hum performance.

The price:
$499 to 542.00

Source

The Canon EOS Rebel T4i

Don't just acquire a camera, be sure that you posses a gadget that is capable of stilling images the way you want it to be.

Overall, the photo and video quality of the T4i still rates as excellent, though at high ISO sensitivities it's slightly surpassed by the T3i; it looks like either the blue channel in the new sensor just isn't as sensitive as the previous one or Canon's processing the heck out of it. JPEGs are fine up through ISO 400 if you're not a pixel peeper; if you are, you'll find even slightly out-of-focus areas start to show some artifacts as low as ISO 200. At high ISO sensitivities the noise reduction is relatively intelligent, with suppression artifacts only in the dark areas and on some high-contrast edges. I suggest you don't use the default Auto Picture Style when shooting JPEG in low light, because it boosts the contrast and you really lose a lot of shadow detail. If you shoot raw, you've got latitude up to about ISO 1600, but you'll end up applying a lot of luminance NR to get rid of the hot pixels.

The advantage: The Canon EOS Rebel T4i delivers extremely good photo and video quality plus improved performance in Live View shooting over the T3i -- as long as you buy the more expensive 18-135mm STM kit. Plus, the camera has a more streamlined shooting design than its predecessor.
The unfavorable: The feature set remains rather blah, and its photos aren't as good as the T3i's at high ISO sensitivities.
The offer: A fine camera, the Canon EOS Rebel T4i's more expensive 18-135mm STM kit (or body with another STM lens) is the only version that merits an unqualified recommendation. You can probably find better alternatives if you just want a sub-$1,000 dSLR for still photography.

Source