Canon Powershot A550 Review

The low price and good performance of this device can make you forget the features which are missing.

Verdict
With its fast performance and correct his photos, the Canon PowerShot A550 is a good camera small budget. It does not include many special features and is not particularly compact and lightweight, but it is a good choice if you do not want to pay crazy for your shots.

Canon Powershot A550 Review

The Canon PowerShot A550 is a camera 7 megapixels simple and cheap, and that is all his ambition. While it has some nice features, it does not offer that is sufficiently original and remarkable to enable it to differentiate themselves from other aircraft in its class, which is not worse.

After all, good performance and satisfactory images are everything that a camera needs to succeed, and the A550 meets these criteria.
If it is not small enough to fit in a pocket of jeans, the A550 remains relatively compact. At least 210 g to 4.3 cm thick, the device will easily in most jacket pockets and bags. The case adopts a design L-shaped common to most of the devices in the range Canon PowerShot A, due to its generous handful. The buttons are spacious and comfortable, and they are arranged in a logical way to the rear and on top of the camera.
The A550 is a relatively whatsoever, without feature remarkable or unusual. Its most notable attribute is its 4x zoom which displays a focal range of 35 to 140 mm (equivalent to a 35 mm c amera), which leaves you a little more margin than traditional 3x zoom of most cameras small budget. It has a smaller LCD screen than usual (5 cm), which is accompanied by an optical viewfinder to facilitate shooting in the dark or in strong light. In addition to these features, the A550 has the standard assortment of preset scene modes and setting image adjustment, including a video mode VGA (640 x 480 pixels) at 30 frames per second (fps) and, surprise , A video mode QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) high speed of 60 fps.

Finally, like most digital cameras of the range Canon PowerShot A, the A550 accepts AA batteries, which is practical.

The A550 has produced good performances in virtually all our tests. After a time which starts very short 1.5 seconds, we were able to move all the cliches 1.7 seconds, a clear improvement over the previous PowerShot A5×0 cameras. Unfortunately, with built-in flash activated, this period has more than tripled, rising to 4.9 seconds per shot. The shutter of the cam era has been reactive: within less than 0.5 seconds with our subject and strongly contrasted just 1.2 seconds with our low-contrast subject. The burst mode has also shown pleasantly fast, taking 51 shots in full resolution 31.4 seconds, representing a rate of 1.6 fps.

The photos were quite beautiful, even if they suffered from an excessive salary and fringe effects in some places. The colors are returned, although the photos taken indoors with the automatic white balance draw heavily on yellow, a common problem for most machines. Noise remains low until adjustment sensitivity of ISO 400, where a small grain begins to emerge. Not surprisingly, the images show a lot of noise at ISO 800, speckles reducing the fine details and colors.

The setting ISO 800 is usually reserved for a shooting in low-light conditions and high-speed, so the shots all day should they not pose too many problems.

Filed under Canon, Digital Cameras |

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