Amazon sells this camera alone for $400, so this $400 kit with the camera and a bunch of accessories means the accessories are essentially free. I received the camera quickly and it works great out of the box. The 30x zoom is not a gimmick. I took this camera to the America's Cup yacht races in San Francisco and was able to take clear photos of the individual boats, even when they were miles away from shore. At a baseball game, I can zoom in close enough to read the writing on a baseball bat, even though I am sitting in the cheap seats. You do need good sunlight to use the zoom; results are much less interesting indoors since either high ISO or long shutter speeds will create blurry photos.
The zoom isn't this camera's only great feature. The HX50 also takes great macro photos since it can focus sharply on objects (flowers, insects, coins, etc) that are just 1cm away from the lens. This is a great feature for nature photographers (just like the zoom is great for photographing distant wild animals). Sometimes you have to try several time before it focuses on your closeup subject though, especially if their are multiple objects in your scene (like focusing on one flower in a bunch).
I'm happy with the camera's WiFi features, though many professional reviews are not. Perhaps that is because I am using an Android smartphone and all the pro reviewers are using iphones. The WiFi works flawlessly for me, allowing me to quickly upload photos to my phone in the field, then post them to the internet from my phone (great for sports and other events). I especially like being able to select individual photos to upload with WiFi. I've used EyeFi in other camera and that really kills your battery because it uploads all your photos all the time. The WiFi in this camera seems to have minimal effect on battery life (if you're only uploading selected photos).
I've only tried the WiFi remote control a couple of times and it worked as expected. I can imagine this being useful if you're standing in a crowd at a concert or other event and want to hold the camera over your head (above the crowd) and still compose the scene accurately.
The GPS works great, too, at least outdoors. GPS locks on quickly and surprisingly doesn't seem to have a big effect on battery life (like it does with some other GPS cameras I have owned in the past). GPS is great if you're shooting at a lot of different locations on the same day, especially if you are on vacation and don't really remember where you shot the photo. The GPS coordinates are stored in a standard format in each image's meta data so you can view it using a wide variety of tools.
The camera has a ton of modes that may or may not be useful to you. I really like the aperture priority mode, instead of the auto-everything mode. Being able to force the aperture wide open is a really great feature for sports and wildlife photos. An exposure override dial on top of the camera is another really great feature that even many SLR cameras do not have. HDR and panorama modes don't work as well as photoshop, but doing it in-camera is really simple and allows you to immediately post to the internet using the camera's WiFi feature. I don't use any of the "creative scene" modes, though those are apparently popular with kids.
The main negative for this camera is that image quality is only mediocre, especially compared to Sony's RX100 which packs a big image sensor in a camera that is smaller than the HX50. Packing that sensor into a 30X zoom camera would unfortunately violate the laws of physics, at least with the current state of the art for lens design. If you take a lot of indoors or nighttime photos where the 30X zoom is not real useful, you should look hard at the RX100 which takes much better photos in those conditions.
Some people complain about the lack of RAW mode, but realistically this camera does not have good enough image quality for RAW to be really useful. If you care about your image detail enough to want RAW, you should buy an RX100 instead.
It is hard to complain about the accessories in this bundle when they are essentially free. However, only the Sony memory card is a name brand item and at only 16GB it is far from Sony's top-of-the-line. The camera case is secured by a small piece of velcro that I don't trust. The tripod is flimsy and not adjustable and probably only useful for indoor tabletop use. The battery is generic with unknown quality. The card reader and screen protectors are very low quality. I wish they had provided fewer accessories that were better quality since I will discard most of these unused, but again I can't complain too much when they are essentially free.
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