Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Canon PowerShot SD550 (Initial Impression)

Picked up the Canon PowerShot SD550 camera yesterday (I was also looking at the SD600). My criteria was ultra-compact, with a separate viewfinder (allows for less battery drain) that uses SD cards (since my laptop has a SD card slot). I got a camera with twice the pixels as my old Sony camera that wrote to mini-CDs for about 1/3 the cost of what I paid 5 years ago.

Now, for the most part, I liked my old Sony camera. Writing to the mini-CDs came in handy when dealing with older computers (USB ports and USB thumb drives was not as common back in 2001). It was very nice to be able, at the end of a shoot, to finalize the CD-R and hand it to someone to make a copy. I got about 120 photos on a CD-R and my 2 batteries lasted about 200-300 shots.

The downside of the old Sony is the size. The CD-R made it into a rather bulky camera that didn't fit easily into pockets, backpacks, or my laptop bag. It was still smaller and lighter then the old Pentax K-1000 SLR that I used to use.

So I'm not sure what to do with the old Sony camera.

The new camera, OTOH, is at the limits of being too small to be useable. This thing is *tiny*. The thickness is about the same as a deck and a half of cards and the length/width is slightly smaller then said deck of cards. Add a little $9 Case Logic TBC1 ultra-compact camera case and it's still thin enough to hide away in an inner coat pocket (imagine 2 decks of cards). That makes it easy to carry around, easy to conceal, and (hopefully) less of a target for when I'm just walking around a locale. (The Sony was difficult to hide or be discreet with.)

I can even pack a pair of spare SD cards and the spare battery (which I bought, always carry a spare!) into the mini-case. What I should've done was get a 2nd ultracompact case for holding the AC charger and one or two SD card cases (which are made out of aluminum). I'll probably pickup another $9 case the next time I'm in Circuit City. Eventually, I might purchase a 3rd battery.

I ordered a few Kingston 1GB SD cards from MWave (or NewEgg) because the prices at Circuit City were too high. Their prices were only competitive if you jumped through the rebate hoop. I'd rather pay a bit of shipping and get the same price without the rebate nonsense. Each 1GB card allows me to store about 300 pictures in the highest resolution (3072x2304) / highest quality mode. This camera only allows storage in JPEG and each image averages out around 2.7MB.

Picture quality on the camera is pretty good. There's a bit of barrel distortion at the corners of the image, but that's not something that bothers me. For prosumer work, I plan on picking up a new digital SLR once they hit 15-20 megapixels for under a grand. Mostly I'm using this camera to document computer installations and for touristy pictures. I'll post some sample pictures in a few days.

The one feature that sparks my imagination is the "stich" mode. The first picture you take sets the exposure, then you pan across the landscape that you're capturing (overlapping the previous image). You can then stich the multiple images (up to 26) back together in the computer to get a very high resolution photograph. That's definitely something I'm going to experiment with.

The other thing that makes me happy about this camera is the speed. Quick to activate, quick to take pictures. And you can even do continous pictures (multiple times per second down to about once per second) if you have a high-speed (133x) SD card installed. Makes the old Sony camera look pokey.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 8:48 AM (0 comments)