The Canon Powershot A550 Digital Camera

Canon's "A" series digicams are famous for their practicality, flexibility, class leading performance, impressive build-quality, and amazing ease of use – that’s why they’ve been number one in U. S. sales for the past four years. "A" series digicams are far more modular than Canon’s other consumer level digital cameras and that modularity is a large part of what makes them so appealing. The newest member of the "A" family is the Canon PowerShot A550 - which replaces last years super popular A530 model. Canon’s design folks have recycled components (like the second-generation DIGIC II processor, 7 megapixel CCD sensor, 2 inch LCD screen, AF system, auto exposure system, and 4X zoom) from other Canon digicams to hold down the A550’s price.

NUTS & BOLTS

Viewfinder/LCD

The A550's coupled (zooming) optical viewfinder is sharp, fairly bright, and eminently useable - but it is a bit squinty and only covers about eighty per cent of the image frame. There's no diopter adjustment for eyeglasses wearers.

The A550's 2.0" (86,000 pixels) lo-res TFT LCD screen is noticeably grainy, but it is (barely) sharp enough to get the job done. The user selectable LCD Grid-Line display is a nice touch. The A550's LCD screen is fairly bright, hue accurate, relatively fluid, and it automatically boosts gain in dim/low light.

Zoom

The A550 features the same 7.3mm - 29.2 mm (35-140mm in 35mm equivalent) f/2.8-f4.1 all-glass (8 elements in 7 groups with two aspherical elements) zoom that graces Canon's superb A640. When the camera is powered up the zoom extends automatically and when the camera is powered down the zoom is fully retracted into the camera body and a built in iris style lens cover closes to protect it. The A550's zoom is sharp, hue accurate, relatively fast, and fairly quiet.

This zoom displays some minor corner softness and negligible barrel distortion at the wide-angle end of the range. Pincushion distortion is very well controlled (and essentially invisible) at the telephoto end of the zoom. Chromatic aberration (purple fringing) is slightly above average, especially noticeable in high contrast color transition areas. Overall, the A550's zoom is surprisingly good for an entry-level digital camera. The A550's 4X zoom isn't threaded for filters or add on lenses, but users can (after purchasing the optional Canon LA-DC58F Conversion Lens adapter) mount auxiliary wide-angle, telephoto, or macro lenses and inexpensive 52mm filters.

Auto Focus (AF)

The A550 features the same TTL Contrast Detection 9-point AiAF (Advanced intelligent Auto Focus) system as its predecessors. In all automatic exposure modes the camera analyzes the scene in front of the lens and then calculates camera to subject distance to determine which of the 9 AF points is closest to the primary subject (closest subject priority) and then locks focus on that AF point. Users can also opt for the 1 AF point (center) AF for classic portraits or traditional landscapes. AF performance is consistently quicker than average (for entry level digicams). In low light the focus assist beam helps illuminate the subject for more accurate focusing.

Flash

The A550's built-in multi mode Light-Guide zoom flash provides users with the only zooming flash in its class. When users zoom out (toward a remote subject) -- the flash head "zooms" too. What this means in practical terms is that the flash covers a broader area at the wide-angle end of the zoom range and a narrower area at the telephoto end of the range.

Flash options include: Auto (fires when needed), On (fill flash), Red-Eye Reduction, and off. Canon claims the maximum flash range is a bit less than 12 feet (3.5 meters) and that appears to be a fairly accurate assessment based on my limited use. Canon's optional HF-DC1 auto (slave) flash provides users with an enhanced slate of lighting options and extends maximum flash range to about 30 feet.

Memory Media

The A550 saves images to SD, SDHC, & MMC memory media. SDHC cards are designed to support higher capacities (4GB to 32GB) than standard SD cards. SDHC cards look just like a standard SD card, but they will only work in SDHC compliant flash memory devices - users who opt for a higher capacity SDHC card will probably need to buy a new card reader. Canon includes a 16 MB SD starter card in the box.

Connectivity

USB 2.0 High Speed, A/V out, and DC in (with optional AC Adaptor).

Power

The A550 is powered by two (2) alkaline, NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride), or lithium ion AA cells. Canon claims 140 shots (full time LCD use) or 1000 shots (using only the optical viewfinder) with available anywhere Alkaline AA’s (we got 89 shots - no flash, but heavy review/delete/re-shoot with the included alkaline AAs).

Once the included alkaline AAs were exhausted we switched to a pair of 2300 mAh NiMH rechargeable AA batteries. According to Canon the A550 is good for (up to) 550 shots (full time LCD use) and up to 1400 shots (with the optical viewfinder) when high capacity rechargeable AA's are loaded. I didn't keep track of exposures and we used the LCD screen and optical viewfinder about equally for compositional chores (plus occasional flash use) so I can't argue with Canon’s numbers, however keep in mind that mileage may vary substantially, dependent on individual shooting style. Overall, the A550's power management is amazingly good.

EXPOSURE

The A550 recycles the remarkably simple yet very sophisticated auto exposure system that made its predecessors so popular with consumers. Exposure options include Auto (Point and Shoot mode), Program (Auto exposure with user input), Aperture Priority mode, Shutter Priority mode, and Manual mode. The DIGIC II (Digital Imaging Integrated Circuit) processor combines most primary camera functions (image interpolation and processing, auto exposure, White Balance, JPEG compression, gain control, and power management) in one chip which improves efficiency and that makes for quicker startup, faster processing, and near real time shutter response. DIGIC II (Digital Imaging Integrated Circuit) image files are optimized for bold, bright, saturated colors and balanced contrast.

Shooters can also opt for the A550's Scene modes including Portrait, Landscape, Night Scene, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets, Indoor, Foliage, Snow, Beach, Fireworks, and Underwater. Canon’s exclusive iSAPS (Intelligent Scene Analysis based on Photographic Space) technology produces consistently excellent exposures in all scene modes. The camera instantly matches the scene in front of the lens with an on board database of known scene types and then compares that information with the specific scene's subject distance, white balance, contrast, dynamic range, lighting, and color (just before the image is recorded) to determine the best exposure. In all Scene modes the camera's CPU automatically optimizes all exposure parameters (aperture, shutter speed, white balance, sensitivity, etc.) for the specific scene type selected. The ISAPS system works hand in hand with Canon’s DIGIC II processor and AiAF "smart" auto focus system to quickly capture properly exposed images with accurate color, balanced contrast, and tack sharp focus.

Based on my experiences with the camera, the A550’s Auto (Auto, Program, and Scene) modes deliver dependably accurate exposures in virtually any outdoor lighting, but there is a very slight tendency toward over exposure and occasional burnt-out highlights in all auto modes.

Movie Mode

Canon PowerShot A550 users can record video clips (with audio) at 640x480 @ 30 fps with duration limited to 1GB/60 minutes. The A550 can also record up to 60 seconds of fast frame rate QVGA (60 fps) video clips and several lower resolution video options. There’s also a voice-notation mode so users to add audio notes (up to 60 seconds) to their pictures.

Metering

The A550's (default) evaluative metering system is consistently accurate in all but the most demanding lighting. Newbie and casual photographers won’t have to worry about metering at all and more experienced photographers can opt for either Spot metering or Center-weighted Averaging metering for more demanding/creative compositions or for a more traditional "look" in portraits and landscapes.

White Balance (WB)

The A550 provides experienced users with a decent selection of white balance options including TTL Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, and Fluorescent H. Like all Canon consumer digicams the A550’s Auto WB setting produces slightly warmer than average colors.

Sensitivity

Like its more expensive siblings, the Canon PowerShot A550 provides an excellent range of sensitivity settings which provide photographers with the flexibility to shoot indoors without flash and shoot at faster shutter speeds (to freeze action) outdoors. Sensitivity options include: Auto, High ISO Auto, and user selectable settings for ISO 80,100, 200, 400, and 800.

In-Camera Image Adjustment

In-camera image adjustment options are often overlooked by casual or first-time digicam purchasers, but savvy users know the ability to make subtle color/contrast/exposure adjustments is a very important creative tool and a simple and effective way to overcome minor exposure problems. The A550 provides shooters with a very useful range of built-in exposure tweaks.

Very light or very dark subjects can trick light metering systems into underexposing or overexposing images. The A550's Exposure Compensation mode allows users to subtly modify exposure parameters over a 4 EV range (+ /-2 EV) in 1/3 EV increments allowing users to easily lighten or darken exposures to compensate for difficult lighting and subject/background reflectance/non-reflectance problems or to compensate for environmental exposure variables.

The A550's "My Colors" mode provides several creative color options: Positive Film (mimics slide film color, saturation, and contrast), Neutral Film (mimics print film color, saturation, and contrast), Lighter Skin Tone, Darker Skin Tone, Vivid Blue, Vivid Green, Vivid Red, Color accent (shifts images to B&W, except for one user selected color), color swap (allows users to switch one color for another), custom color (users can adjust color balance for red, green, blue, and skin tones +/-2 arbitrary steps in 1 step increments) and Photo effects (vivid or neutral color saturation, low sharpening, sepia, and B&W).

CONTROLS, DESIGN, ENGINEERING, & ERGONOMICS

The Canon PowerShot A550 Digital Camera bears a striking family resemblance to its more expensive siblings. It's an attractive, relatively compact, and durable (polycarbonate body shell) digicam. The control layout has been slightly improved - the reconfigured mode dial provides instant access to five of Canon’s most popular Special Scene modes (plus all the standard settings) and there's a nifty new Shooting mode/Playback mode button that permits "one-touch" direct switching between recording and playback modes. All controls are logically placed and easily accessed and the ergonomic handgrip provides stability and nicely balances the camera in use.

Experienced photographers should have no difficulty using the A550 right out of the box and beginners should be able to shoot first-rate images after a short familiarization run with the camera and brief scan of the user's manual.

Technical Specifications

Resolution: 7 Megapixels (3072x2304)
Viewfinders: 2.0” LCD screen and Real Image zooming optical viewfinder
Zoom: f2.6-f5.5/5.8mm-23.2mm (35mm-140mm - 35mm equivalent) all glass 4X optical zoom
Auto Focus: 9 AF point AiAF
Manual Focus: no
Flash: Built-in Multi-mode
Exposure: Auto, Program AE, Scene modes, Aperture priority, Shutter priority, Manual mode, and Movie mode
Metering: Evaluative, Center-weighted, & Spot
Exposure compensation: Yes +/- 2 EV in 1/3 EV increments
White balance: Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, and Fluorescent H
Sensitivity: Auto, 80, 100, 200, 400, & 800 ISO (35mm equivalent)
Image Storage Media: SD/SDHC/MMC
Connectivity: USB 2.0HS out, AV/out, & DC in
Power: 2 AA batteries

MSRP - $199.00 ("best" price should stabilize at around $150.00 by early Summer)

Included

16MB SD card, 2 AA Alkaline batteries, wrist strap, USB & A/V cables, software CD's, user’s and software manuals.

Optional

Canon NiMH Rechargeable AA Batteries & Charger Kit CBK4-300, AC Adapter Kit ACK900, High Power (slave) Flash HF-DC1, Conversion Lens Adapter LA-DC58F, Canon WC-DC58N 0.7x Wide Converter lens, TC-DC58N 1.75x Tele-converter lens, 250D 58mm Close-up Lens, and Canon soft camera case.

In the Field/Handling & Operation

I often get together with an old friend who sells new and used digital and analog photographic equipment. Between us we have more than fifty years of hands on experience with hundreds of cameras (both film and digital), scores of lenses (zooms and primes), dozens of flash units, and a boatload of filters, tripods, and other esoteric imaging accessories.

My friend was recently able to get his hands on a brand new Canon Powershot A550 for us to check out. The first thing we did was to run some color tests. We use a homemade macro stage and a selection of brightly colored (red, green, yellow, blue, orange, and purple) plastic children’s beach toys arrayed on a white background. This test allows us to check color accuracy and the precision of the camera’s white balance system (and compare the results from camera to camera). The A550 showed consistently accurate (hue) color balance, although typically (for consumer digicams) colors are somewhat oversaturated.

For our first outing with the nifty little A550 we chose nearby Cave Hill Cemetery; the perfect place to shoot some late winter scenics. Cave Hill started out as a small heavily forested farm on the outskirts of the city and became Louisville's primary burial ground in the mid 1830's. Since that time the area has been planted with thousands of trees, shrubs, and bushes. Many of these plantings are rare and exotic which makes Cave Hill absolutely gorgeous in the spring, summer and fall. Things are a bit different in the winter. February weather is always pretty nasty here in Louisville, with daytime temperatures in the twenties and thirties and (mostly) ugly gray skies.

We'd had some fresh snow earlier (about an inch) so we wanted to try to shoot some "real winter" scenics. The cemetery was completely deserted when we got there so we were able to shoot some 19th century native limestone headstones still dusted in white from our recent snow - unfortunately the snow wasn't deep enough to cover the uniform brownish carpet of last year’s fallen leaves. The sky was gray and overcast with very diffused light, making for dark almost monochromatic images. The low twenties temperatures and a stiff icy breeze drove us back to car pretty quickly.

We settled next on trying some winter scenics in nearby Cherokee Park. The park’s Scenic Loop runs along Beargrass Creek between steep heavily forested hillsides so we were hoping that we would be partially protected from the cold breezes. Unfortunately, the wind was positively howling down the tiny valley along Beargrass Creek. During Spring, Summer, and Fall Cherokee Park is absolutely gorgeous---but during the winter all of north central Kentucky is pretty depressing -- gray skies, leafless trees, and dead yellow grass highlight a landscape that is essentially dull, brown, and completely boring from late November to early March. It didn’t take the bone numbing cold long to get to us and we called it a day.

We decided to warm up a bit with a cappuccino at the Heine Brothers coffee shop at Eastern Parkway and Bardstown Road and try to capture some sneaky interior shots of our fellow refugees from the dismal weather. We grabbed a table along the wall, set the A550 to Hi ISO auto and placed it on a folded newspaper with the LCD hidden from our fellow patrons, making it possible to swing the camera easily in a 180 degree arc that took in almost the entire interior of the small dimly lit coffee shop. After we warmed up a bit we reviewed our captured images. The shots from Cave Hill and Cherokee Park were so flat, colorless, and boring we ended up deleting all of them. Our Heine Brothers shots were pretty much what we expected - dull and detail poor with muted colors and lots of noise.

We got together the following morning and headed for Louisville’s Extreme Sports Park to shoot some skateboarders. The weather was much better than the day before with pale blue skies and fairly bright lighting (it was still very cold). Skateboarders turn up at the park at all hours of the day and night (and in all sorts of weather) to hone their skills -- so local photographers have a great place to go, almost anytime, for capturing action shots. The bowls and pipes are perfectly placed (although the urban backgrounds are consistently ugly and very difficult to overcome) for getting action shots of skateboarders "catching some air" in gravity defying leaps.

The A550 is very quick for an entry level P&S digicam and that simplified tracking and framing skateboarders as they zoomed up and down the steep sides of the park's pipes and bowls. Really good skateboarders move at amazing speeds and optimal framing/timing (centering the boarders in the frame AND stopping the action in mid air) is very difficult. The A550's AiAF "smart" Auto Focus is the fastest I’ve seen on any sub two hundred dollar digital camera. Shutter fire is almost instantaneous with pre-focus and only requires about half a second (at the high shutter speeds in good light) from scratch. The A550 is still a bit too slow for freezing the fastest action (noticeably slower than entry level digital SLR’s) but a skilled photographer can achieve optimal timing on action shots by anticipating the crucial moment and tripping the shutter just before everything comes together.

After we finished up at the Extreme Park we headed for nearby West Main Street, which is lined with three and four story warehouses sporting colorfully painted decorative cast iron fronts. We parked near the Louisville Science Center, the most striking building on West Main Street, and spent about an hour shooting tight architectural studies of the colorful cast iron building fronts lit up by the oblique late afternoon light.

PERFORMANCE

Image Quality

We put the snazzy little A550 through its paces and it consistently produced well-exposed images with good dynamic range. Reds are a bit warm and blues are a little bright, but most casual/amateur photographers probably won't consider this a fault. ISO 80/ISO 100 images are indistinguishable - bright ccolors, slightly hard edged native contrast, and low noise levels – ISO 200 images were also very good, but with a little less pop. At the ISO 400 setting noise levels are noticeably higher and there's a perceptible loss of detail. ISO 800 images are way too noisy for anything important, but they should be OK for e-mail and non-critical 3x5 or 4x6 prints.

There was some noticeable chromatic aberration in the transition areas between dark foreground objects and bright backgrounds (think bare tree limbs against a gray sky) in a couple of our shots, but most of our images showed very little or no need for post exposure correction.

Shutter Lag/Timing

The A530 was a very quick digital camera, equal to or faster than any camera in its class and snappier than some more expensive cameras. The A550 actually seems a bit quicker, but that’s subjective and might not be borne out in the test lab. Start up time is about 1.5 seconds (pretty quick for a digicam that has to extend a 4X zoom) and the A550 can move its 4X zoom from the wide-angle end of the zoom range to full telephoto in less than 2 seconds. AF speed is dependably quick in all but the most difficult lighting, typically less than half a second. Shutter lag shouldn’t be a problem for most shooters - shutter fire is virtually instantaneous (1/10th of a second) once focus is achieved and pre-focused shots are essentially real time. Shot-to-shot times and write to card times are also noticeably quicker than average.

A Few Concerns

I don't have any real concerns with the A550 - 7 megapixels and a 4X zoom for two hundred bucks - come on, you're not really going to be able do much better than that. I rarely use the LCD screen as a viewfinder (I much prefer the optical viewfinder), but I do like to review my captured images – and a bigger LCD screen would have been nice. ISO 800 images are way too noisy, but that isn’t really surprising since crowding more than 7 million pixels onto a tiny CCD sensor is bound to increase image noise. Redeye may cause some heartburn for dedicated portrait shooters, but the A550 isn't any worse in this regard than its competition.

There is some minor corner softness in virtually all images, but that is also par-for-the-course with virtually all consumer level P&S digicams. The new Canon Powershot A550 is an almost perfect digicam for its target audience. More advanced shooters (those who need more megapixels, enhanced creative flexibility, and expanded exposure options, etc.) won't be looking too closely at the A550 anyway.

Who is the A550 best suited for?

The A550 (like its predecessor) is a super choice as a primary family camera. It is an excellent choice for travelers who want a tough lightweight "go anywhere" digital camera. The A550 is also well suited to beginning and casual photographers who want a digital camera that will consistently provide excellent digital images at the touch of a button.

Conclusion

Canon’s "A" series digicams have been very popular with consumers since the introduction of the groundbreaking little A20 in 2001. I’ve used every "A" series Canon digicam (except the A460) since the A20's debut and I’ve enjoyed all of them for their winning combination of usability, practicality, functionality, flexibility, dependability, durability, and excellent performance. The A550 doesn't deviate from that winning formula, it actually improves upon it. Canon's new A550 is a solid best buy at less than two hundred bucks, one of the top general use digicams available right now.

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The observations, opinions, recommendations, and conclusions provided in my digital camera reviews are based on more than 30 years experience as a photographer and extensive hands on testing of each of the cameras reviewed.