- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 66 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
-
12 out of 14 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Powerful, Small, Yet Lacking - Returned to Ritz"
Pros: Fits in shirt pocket - Great Battery Life - Lots of Megapixels
Cons: No lighting control - terrible auto settings - jitter light always on
Summary: I bought this camera last week wanting a camera that is small yet does everything; I clearly made a mistake. I tested this camera in all types of lighting, yet it rarely took outstanding pictures. It doesn't let you adjust the apperture settings, and it always tends to make terrible automatic lighting choices. In a situations where it should widen the apperture, it never does. It tends to favor longer exposure times. Being a person who likes natural light better than a flash, I always turned it off. And, thus, I wound up with blurry or dark pictures. After hundreds of pictures and a week of giving it every chance to prove itself, I gave up. Back to Ritz it went.
Even in relatively good lighting conditions, it chose horrifying exposure times like 1/6 of a second. ??? In room lighting it even chose 1 second exposures! It lets you adjust exposure + or -2, but the pics look terrible! I'm sorry, but somebody with a pocket camera is NOT going to be carrying around a tripod to make sure their pics aren't blurry.
I can't use a camera that not only doesn't let me control something as simple as the apperture, but it makes bad choices about the lighting. Even in bright daylight, in the shadow of a pine tree, the jitter light was on because it was choosing horrible exposure times! BTW- the jitter light is on about 90% of the time with this camera. I guess you just have to live with it.
Now, even so, this is a good camera.
1. The colors are natural and accurate.
2. The pictures are amazingly clear.
3. The auto-focus is next-to-perfect.
4. The battery life is impressive. I would take in excess of 100 (more even) shots without a recharge fully using the lcd screen.
5. The screen size is a pleasure.
6. It's fast!
Okay, my conclusion is this: this camera is a beautifully engineered piece of camera. It's amazing. Unfortunately, it takes terrible pictures because of something that would have been so easy for Canon to fix. My pictures did NOT live up to ANY of my expectations.
A good analogy for this camera is this: This camera is like an expensive new Mercades that automatically chooses the brake and acceleration settings for you and doesn't do a good job of it. Thus, you're always cursing about how you'd prefer to apply your own pressure to the brake.
Sorry Canon. Maybe the next Elph will be better and I'll buy that one.
Where to buy
Canon PowerShot SD550:
$649.99
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Amazon.com Marketplace
|
$649.99 | Yes |
|
