The automatic focus was usually accurate in bright light and somewhat less so in low-light environments. Because the camera doesn't have an AF-assist lamp, it was often difficult to see anything on the LCD screen when shooting in dim conditions. The photos came out fine, but we were limited in the types of shots we were able to capture. We found the automatic focus to be reasonably fast, even in low light. The large LCD screen has a nearly 100 percent coverage, so you'll see an accurate representation for your composition. The optical viewfinder, on the other hand, is too small and covers only about 80 percent of the scene.
Some flash photos came out a bit overexposed. That's less of a problem with this camera because you can quickly adjust your settings with the dedicated exposure-compensation button--which, unfortunately, operates with only the aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and programmed-auto modes.
Battery life will depend on whether you use the two nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable AA batteries that ship with the product, a set of standard AA alkaline cells, or the optional nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable pack. With the supplied 2,300mAh rechargeable AA batteries, we were able to capture 321 images, evenly split between flash and nonflash photos; using our standard 1,850mAh set, we managed 835 under the same conditions, though the low-battery warning came on after 333 photos.
When shot in situations with plenty of light, the Fujifilm FinePix E550's ISO 80 photos were sharp with well-saturated colors, decent white balance, and a lot of detail in the midtones and shadows. Unfortunately, by optimizing the image for those elements, the E550's photos frequently looked overexposed, with seriously blown-out highlights.
We also spotted a few of Fujifilm's typical postprocessing artifacts, including oversharpened edges and color blooming on red and white boundaries. In addition, we saw purple fringing at high-contrast edges around the periphery of the scene, where the focus falls off. Many consumer cameras suffer from this phenomenon, and it's likely to turn up only in extreme situations. Our 640x480 30fps video captures from the E550 were surprisingly free of visual defects, except for an increase in compression artifacts when we panned the camera.
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FinePix E550 Digital Camera:
