Digital Camera Blog

If you’re looking for a camera that lets you tweak each and every setting but aren’t ready to start toting around separate lenses, check out the Olympus SP-550 UZ. Its rubberized, gun-metal-gray body looks like a scaled-down DSLR with a large lens and a hand grip. Features include seven-megapixel resolution, an impressive 18X optical zoom, and a 2.5-inch LCD.

The top of the SP-550 UZ houses an image stabilizer, shutter button, and zoom, plus a mode dial for selecting the shooting settings. On the back, you’ll find the menu, review, display, and delete buttons, along with a four-way navigation button to the right of the LCD. Above that is a button that turns the display off and on.

The SP-550 UZ offers a whopping 30 modes, including Cuisine, Snow, and even three underwater settings. In addition to these presets, the camera has Auto, Program Auto, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Manual modes, plus five flash settings. A few of the most interesting settings include High-Speed Sequential Shooting, which captures several images in a row, and a Pre-Capture mode, which takes five shots before the shutter button is fully pressed to keep you from missing any action. You’ll also find five ISO speeds, ranging from 50 to 5000, but at its highest settings, the resolution drops to 3.2 MP, and a decent amount of noise is apparent.

To prevent your photos from looking blurry, the SP-550 UZ includes what Olympus calls a two-in-one anti-blur solution. This includes two antishake settings: Sensor Shift Image Stabilization, which compensates for movement, and Digital Image Stabilization, which handles blurriness at high ISOs and fast shutter speeds. Both shake-reduction features proved effective and made a noticeable difference–especially in some low-light photos we took on the street at night.

Overall, the SP-550 UZ performed well when taking a variety of shots. The 18X optical zoom is the SP-550 UZ’s standout featureSP-550 UZ. We were able to see the details of the bricks on a building across the street clearly and were able to get within one centimeter of some paperclips on our desk.

The SP-550 UZ records 30-fps VGA videos with audio. You can use the zoom while filming, but the focus takes a few seconds to catch up. Overall, the camera produced decent clips with slightly muffled sound. It saves the videos as AVI files in the camera’s meager 20MB of internal memory, or you can save them to an xD Card.

We’re not sure why the SP-550 UZ runs on four AA batteries, but we would have preferred a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. On the other hand, the Olympus is rated for 490 shots, so you won’t need to have spares on hand unless you take a lot of pictures.

The Olympus SP-550 UZ is a solid camera that will produce pleasing images in almost any situation. That said, we recommend it only for more advanced users who want the control–but not the expense and extra weight–of a DSLR.