Pentax Optio 550 Review

Pentax Optio 550 may be old, but it is still a good buy. The programmed auto-exposure mode provided by most digital cameras will only take you so far. It’ll provide perfectly acceptable snapshots, but it doesn’t provide the kind of creative control that more ambitious photographers will need. Why? Because programmed auto-exposure systems adjust the shutter speed and aperture in combination to get the right exposure. That’s fine if you don’t really understand much about photography but you miss out on the creative control possible when you can adjust the aperture and shutter speed independently.

Many digital camera macro shots suffer, for example, from limited depth of field. This is because the camera’s setting a wide aperture to minimise the risk of camera shake. Alternatively, if you’re shooting outdoors in bright light, it’s difficult to create a sense of movement in action shots or with running water because the camera sets too high a shutter speed.

Pentax Optio 550 Photographic power

The Pentax Optio 550 does let you control both the shutter speed and the aperture. In shutter-priority mode, you adjust the shutter speed yourself and the camera automatically selects the right aperture to give you the correct exposure. In aperture-priority mode it’s the other way round. You can choose a wide aperture to throw a cluttered background out of focus or a small aperture for maximum depth of field -the camera automatically picks the right shutter speed to go with it.

Or you can control both aperture and shutter speed manually. On the Pentax Optio 550, this is done using the navipad on the back and an exposure indicator on the LCD. All this is on top of a standard point-and-shoot program AE, mode, so the Pentax is ideal for both beginners and experts.

It’s got a very impressive lens, too. Most digital cameras that belong to that age offer 3x zooms, but the Pentax lens has a 5x zooming range. What’s interesting here is that the Pentax sticks with an optical viewfinder- most digital cameras with this kind of zooming range switch over to electronic viewfinders, which show a genuine through-the-lens view, but can be dim and grainy-looking.

Pentax Optio 550 is a pretty advanced camera, but it doesn’t have the field to itself by any means. There are plenty of very good rivals out there already Canon’s PowerShot S50 is one, and Olympus’s very capable C-5050 is another. If you want a bigger zooming range, Minolta’s DiMAGE 7i is a superb camera with a 7x zoom and available at very good prices now, while FujiFilm’s FinePix S602 has great handling and a 6x zooming range. All of these digital cameras offer the same advanced exposure modes as the Pentax, so the question is: has it got some other tricks up its sleeve?

Well, a few. It has a ’slim’ filter for example, designed to make people look fitter and leaner (yes, really). You can take time-lapse photographs of growing plants or sunsets, say, with its interval shooting option. There’s a multiple-exposure mode for use when you’re taking shots and, interestingly, for combining images you’ve already saved on the memory card. An auto-bracket function can help make sure you get the perfect exposure, and this is supplemented by an auto-white balance option to help you do the same with your images’ colour balance.

What else? There’s a voice recording mode for dictating notes when you take shots or adding notes to shots later. You can crop or resize saved images and you can have a bit of fun by recording movies in fast forward mode so that the action’s speeded up when you play them back.

You can also display a live image histogram while you’re taking pictures, and this can help you spot whether highlight or shadow detail is going to be ‘clipped’ (where it falls outside the CCD’s dynamic range) and lost – you can then adjust the exposure to fix it. Or, if your composition’s a bit suspect, you can switch on a visible grid which helps you place your subjects on ‘thirds’ within the frame.

The thing is that although these things are useful, they’re not unique. There’s little here that really sets the Pentax apart. It does have a novel 3D mode, where you take two shots from slightly different viewpoints and look at them wearing special glasses later, but unless you’re a fan of stereoscopic photography (a surprisingly well-established field, incidentally), it’s not something you’re going to be using every day.

Perhaps the biggest problem of Pentax Optio 550 is that it’s a bit ungainly and unappealing. The brushed metal/chrome finish on the front is nice but round the back the materials are much more functional. The high spot here is the main mode dial on the top plate, which is big and clear and has settings for each of the camera’s main exposure modes. It’s all logically laid out but everything still feels a bit cheap. One thing that’s particularly annoying is the camera’s startup time: five seconds is just too slow. Zooming, focusing and picture playback are all fine, so it’s a surprise it’s not a bit snappier at switching on. While we’re at it, the 16MB card you get with the 550 is way too stingy for a 5-megapixel camera.

On the upside, the Pentax’s picture quality is generally very good. It captures lots of sharp detail, as you’d expect from a 5-megapixel CCD, colours are natural and vivid, and the exposure system is very accurate in all sorts of lighting conditions – even if you just stick to the program AE mode and the default multi-pattern metering. (You can switch to centre-weighted or spot metering if you prefer.) The only problem we encountered was when shooting close-ups, where the lens displayed a vignette effect, with the image darkening in the corners. All in all, the Pentax Optio 550 digital camera is by no means a bad camera.

Tagged with: 3D mode • Aperture • camera shake • Depth Of Field • lens • multiple exposure • Shutter Speed • stereoscopic photography • voice recording

Filed under: Pentax

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