Digital Trends

Olympus SP-550 UZ March 18th, 2007 | by David Elrich

Performance

I typically start in Auto at highest quality and then drill into the menus and other shooting options. SHQ in Auto for this camera is 3072 x 2304 pixels (7.1MP). A 512MB xD card holds about 120 JPEGs and less than half as many RAW files once you move out of Auto. All of my shooting was done with the Dual Image Stabilization on. In this case Olympus uses a mechanical sensor shift mechanism and digital IS to take the shakes out your photos. For the most part it worked pretty well but for shooting at night, a tripod is really the only way to go.

This camera powers up in about two seconds as the zoom lens emerges from the body. Recently I was in Las Vegas and Atlantic City for business (really) and tried the camera walking the famous Strip at night and Boardwalk in the daylight. While I was in Las Vegas for PMA, I also had the opportunity to use a pre-production model of the 8MP Sony DSC-H9 for some decidedly unscientific comparison of the two new mega zooms. The first thing I noticed about the SP-550UZ was the relatively long time it took to save images to the card—especially shooting at night. There’s a flashing red light next to the LCD that lets you know when the camera is busy. And the Olympus seemed to busy a long time especially with longer exposures. When shooting in daylight, response time was much better but still this is a pokey camera. When shooting in RAW, it took over five seconds for the camera to save the bigger files. Another problem was the “travel time” for the zoom to move from wide angle to maximum telephoto. I know it’s 18x but this camera needs instant jumps to get where you need to go more quickly. By comparison, the Sony moved much faster (saving and zooming) and that was a pre-production camera. Olympus claims a 15 frames per second burst rate with the SP-550UZ but that’s a bogus claim since resolution drops to 3MP (2048 x 1536) rather than full resolution like a D-SLR. This camera has a top ISO rating of 5000 for shooting in low light but unless you want a study in Pointillism and digital noise, keep it on Auto (or as low as possible). No digicam without a larger APS-C sensor can handle digital noise at these lofty levels and even many D-SLRs have issues going above ISO 800—but they’re much better than the 1/2.5-inch sensor used here.

Since this is a newer Olympus, it has a number of handy features to help you master the camera rather quickly including loads of Scene Modes with descriptions including thumbnail samples as well as guide to help you solve problems for specific shooting situations. As always, I applaud any steps taken by manufacturers that help you get the most out of your camera.

For those who want to go beyond simple point-and-shoot, this camera has many manual options including focus, aperture, shutter speed, contrast, sharpness, saturation and more. There’s even in-camera editing that’s becoming so popular such as red-eye fix and overall exposure, cropping and a long list of others including RAW processing. I like the fact you can save RAW images to JPEGs in the camera but you really need a larger screen to do the job properly.

After putting the SP-550UZ through its paces, it was time to download the images and make some 8.5x11 full-bleed prints with no image tweaking either in the camera or printer.

For the most part, I very pleased with the output of this camera. Granted some of the shots I took along the Strip at night were blurry but others did a great job of locking in the focus on extreme telephoto settings. Mechanical image stabilization can just do so much—a tripod or monopod is the only thing that can really guarantee rock solid focus. Still the ability to zoom in on the famous Las Vegas neon was quite good (many were taken in the Night Scene mode). Black on the prints was very good, with very little noise. The only real problem was the lag saving the files to the card—and this was in SHQ JPEG, not RAW. As for the images taken in Atlantic City on a sunny day, the camera handled focus and overall color quite well. The signs on the Boardwalk were very close to reality in terms of a natural feel. Again, there was some delay saving the photos but not really as bad at night in Vegas. When shooting in RAW, it took the camera around six seconds to save a file. Not good at all. Still overall the camera did a solid job.

Iamge Courtesy of Olympus