Customer Reviews

Canon PowerShot A550 7.1MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom

5 star:		(123)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I really did some research on digital cameras, even tried out a Sony, but the Canon brand is by far one of the best. I don't have to do a lot of thinking when snapping a picture with this camera, it does most of the work! I like to be able to think about the compostion of my photo and not ISO, aperature, and all that jazz. The settings make it so easy and the color of the photos turn out so true. The digital zoom is great and will even alert you if the picture will come out blurry. There are so many features on this camera, too many to list. I even found a great deal at Best Buy on a 2 gig memory card, I get over 1,000 photos with a high resolution! It takes alkaline batteries, but I bought rechargeable ones and one charge lasts a long time. I am sooo happy with this camera, I take it with me everywhere, even a couple of days to work.

I ordered a Nikon Coolpix L6 (6MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom) and then ran into a friend at a party. He had one and I gave it a try. SLOW and fair pics. I went home, jumped online and changed the order to the Canon PowerShot A550. This camera is slightly larger, but is quick, good zoom, easy enough on the batteries and takes wonderful pics. Make usre you buy additional SD cards 'cause you'll love using this camera.

I wanted a camera that the whole family could use - Including my 10 year old son. This camera has proven to be that and much more! What impresses me the most is the astounding battery life and the quick focus features. It is at an excellent price point as well. Our pictures no longer suffer from the dreaded 'redeye' effects. I upgraded from a 4 year old Olympus
4 megapixel camera and am blown away by the improvements over that period.
Canon rocks!

For the birthday party, vacations, and casual user, this camera is outstanding at the price. For about $200, you get the great resolution and GREAT color, compact size, and usability you need with 15 kids running around you at a party! You will, of course, immediately need a memory card before using it (the one in the package serves up about 8 pics!) The SanDisk memory cards are supercheap, and I bought both a 1 and 2 GB version, both of which work great (2GB will hold about 1,000 pics...plenty). The program for your computer can be a little clumsy to load, but within 20 minutes I had the program and all my recent pics all loaded into my computer.
Awesome for the price, and unless you are a professional photographer looking to get published in National Geographic, you cannot beat the value priced A550 for 7.1 megapixels and the Canon name. Fill your family scrapbook for under $200.

I'm going to write a positive review of this camera, but you should know that I ended up returning it to Amazon because it didn't meet my specific needs.

I was looking for a high quality, inexpensive point and shoot digital camera when I bought this item. The reasons I returned it had nothing to do with the quality of its prints. Let me make sure I say this: they were outstanding. I loved the ease at which the A550 makes beautiful pictures.

What didn't do it for me was the size, and the lack of a panoramic mode. The camera I ended up with, the $300 Canon SD700, is just so small that I slip it into my pocket without thinking about it. With the A550, I could never forget it was there. This bulkiness lead to me not carrying it all the time, which led to pictures not being made that otherwise might have been. If I had a purse though, or I just wanted something to take on occasional outings, the A550 would have been perfect. If this is you, then get this camera.

Lastly, I got excited about the 4x optical zoom. Don't. Bottom line is that, if you want to really zoom in but be able to take sharp photos, you need to invest in a SLR or DSLR camera system. When I zoom in with the A550, even with my steady grip, pictures often come out quite blurry.

Hope this helps.

This is simply a great camera to get whether you are buying a digital camera for the first time or the fifth time. Why? Because you get all the Canon quality and features for a very good price. At this price you can afford to even gift it to a teenager who wants to learn a little more photography as it offers a little more than just point and shoot.

I've owned about 4 A series cameras in the past, along with S2/S3 series and SD series and I still recommend A series as the best value for money based on its performance. I tried this particular camera when I bought it recently for a gift. Although the size of A series cameras is bigger than SD series making them jacket-pocket cameras, the advantage is in the styling. It gives you a convenient grip on the side which helps hold the camera steady and results in less "blurry" pictures than SD. The mode selector dial on top helps you zip through selections from portrait, landscape to nightshot and special scenes. The convenience of AA batteries which are available in every corner of the world, no missing out on pictures as your battery was discharged, is a great convenience. You can buy 2NiMH batteries with a charger like I did, and never have to buy any more again. The screen is only 2 inch (up from 1.8 earlier) but it makes the camera more durable, as the design makes it more resistant to damage.

And what about the features? :
- It has an intelligent 9 point focusing system with auto red eye correction which means it can choose the focus pretty accurately, although it also gives you the flexibility to choose the focus through 3 modes. (Centered, Evaluative, Spot)
- SD card/MMC card slot - These cards are so cheap now so get the 2GB to store a whole vacation's worth of pictures.
-Pic size- You can choose from 6 sizes for the pics including a widescreen 16:9 format which can be viewed on your HDTV.
-Speed Dial: This dial on top allows fast spinning between shooting modes (night, landscape, indoors, kids, portrait, movie, auto, manual, special) so you never miss a shot. For this feature alone, I'd prefer an A series over SD as I keep missing shots on SD series while trying to change modes through the menu. With this dial even a kid becomes a pro. The SCN(special scenes) mode has Fireworks, Foliage, Beach, Snow, and Night Scene. Now even amateurs can use Canon experience to get the best shot. Fireworks is particularly amazing as it produced some great 4th of July shots. This camera does not have the Photostitch mode found on some other cameras but it does have the macro mode to take close ups.
-Special effects (B/W, Sepia, Vivid, Nuetral etc.) I've used sepia a lot when taking potraits giving them an 'old world' feel. Vivid has been helpful in special situations like a red kite against a blue sky to bring out the colors. You can do this in Photoshop later but how many of us actually get the time to do this, once a pic is taken it's over with for me! This camera does not have the color accent/color swap option which is available on some other Canons.
-You can set white balance manually on this camera or manually adjust shutter or aperture priority. It also has an optical viewfinder which is handy for very dark/very bright situations.
-You can also take videos in 3 different resolutions with this camera and edit them right on the camera.
-The zoom button shows one or many images at a time in the replay mode and you can zoom into each individual image to see parts of it closely.
- While replaying, the images auto-rotate to landscape or portrait mode to align with how you're holding the camera. It's a nice feature as otherwise you can't see the portrait shots properly in the landscape mode.

This camera makes a great first camera, with many features, and the image quality is superb. Especially if you are shooting outdoors the images are unsurpassed by any other brand, in my opinion. So go get it, at this price it's well worth getting it as a second camera for another member of your family during the vacation. You won't mind taking this one on the ride where you'd be scared to take your more expensive cameras!

I bought this camera for a trip my husband and I took to Scotland and England in May. Since this was our first digital camera, I researched many different brands and decided on this one because of the price, the actual pictures other users had uploaded and the reviews. We were not disappointed at all! It was so easy to use - we just left it on auto and it chose all the perfect settings - we've also gotten so many compliments on the quality of the pictures! We used a 2gb memory card and chose lithium batteries. We took over 400 pictures and didn't fill up the card and didn't wear out the batteries which is excellent considering we were gone for 12 days!! I highly recommend this camera to anybody but especially first time digital camera users.

Canon's PowerShot A550 is a simple, inexpensive 7-megapixel camera, and that's all it wants to be. While it has some nice features, it doesn't offer any outstanding, unique aspects that put it above any other camera in the field, and that's just fine. Good performance and solid images are all a camera needs to succeed, and the A550 delivers just that.

Though not quite small enough to slip into your jeans, the A550 is still comfortably compact. At 7.4 ounces and 1.7 inches thick, the camera can fit easily into most jacket pockets and bags. The camera's body has an L-shaped design found on most of Canon's PowerShot A series, giving it a generous grip. The buttons are large and comfortable, and they're laid out logically along the back and the top of the camera.

The A550 is a fairly nondescript camera, with few outstanding or unusual features. Its most notable attribute is its 35mm-to-140mm-equivalent 4X zoom lens, which gives it just a bit more range than the 3X lenses typical of most budget cameras. It has a smaller-than-usual 2-inch LCD screen that is augmented by an optical viewfinder for shooting in dim light. Besides those features, the A550 has the standard handful of scene presets and image adjustment settings, including a 30fps VGA (640x480) movie mode and a pleasantly unexpected 60fps QVGA (320x240) high-speed movie mode. Finally, like most Canon PowerShot A-series cameras, the A550 conveniently takes AA batteries.

The A550 performed well in almost all of our Labs' tests. After its brisk start-up time of 1.5 seconds, we could snap a shot once every 1.7 seconds, a great improvement over previous PowerShot A5x0 cameras. Unfortunately, with the onboard flash enabled, that time more than tripled to 4.9 seconds per shot. The camera's shutter was responsive, lagging less than 0.5 seconds with our high-contrast target and a modest 1.2 seconds with our low-contrast target. Burst mode was also pleasantly fast, managing 51 full-resolution shots in 31.4 seconds for a rate of 1.6 frames per second.

Photos looked pretty good, though they're marred by overprocessing and fringing in spots. Colors reproduce well, though indoor photos shot with automatic white balance come out very yellow, a common problem for most snapshot cameras. Noise is low up to ISO 400 sensitivity, where a fine grain starts to appear. Images are predictably noisy at ISO 800 sensitivity, with speckling damaging fine details and softening colors. ISO 800 is usually reserved for low-light and high-speed shooting, and everyday snapshots shouldn't have many problems.

With quick performance and decent photos, the Canon PowerShot A550 is a solid budget camera. It doesn't have many special features and it's not particularly small or light, but it's a strong choice if you don't want to spend a lot for your snapshots.

I purchased this camera to have a Point and Shoot available when the occasion doesn't call for a full blown 9-10 megapixel DSLR-type like my Fuji S9000. Fujifilm Finepix S9000 9MP Digital Camera with 10.7x Wide Optical Zoom The Canon shoots amazingly fast and produces a large format photo right out of the box. I like the Canon menu tree - it's easy to know where you're going for settings. The LCD is bright and crystal clear. The Canon DIGIC II electronics are worth Googleing and reading about.

The selling point that persuaded me to buy the A550 7.1MP is the TTL Optical (Through The Lense) vuefinder. Most other PnS cameras leave you with only a LCD screen to vue through...I find them awkward and not true when composing a shot.

SD media is the most inexpensive and available on the market. The A550 can use SD, SDHC and MMC. A couple 1Gig pieces should serve you well, the faster writing the better - DON'T SKIMP HERE. A slow writing media card will bother you eventually.

Arm yourself with 3 or 4 changes of rechargeable batteries and go shoot the world, or at least try. Read your Manual - download one from the Canon site to browse while on the computer. You'll find this camera is about as versatile as they come.

We wanted a camera that uses AA batteries (for convenience) and is easy to hold (for my young children when they take picture of us) so we bought this camera. I had a Canon Powershot A80 and liked the picture quality but it broke after three years of use. The A80 was quite expensive at that time so I hesitate to get another point-and-shot that priced at the higher-end. We are very satisfied with the price, the picture quality, and the functions of the A550. The only shortcoming of the A550 I noticed so far is that the recharge of the flash is quite slow (even with full battery) so there is a longer-than-usual wait time before you can take the next picture after using flash.