Forget having to trail down the high street any more with that Stone Age film cartridge, seeking to find some kind soul to take it away and develop your pix in a day or two if you’re lucky. The wonders of modern digital technology has rendered all that fiddling round and inconvenience a sad relic of an earlier age.
When you can get a bright shiny new digital camera for less than 400 quid which gives simply wonderful results and requires no ongoing maintenance or expense other than the occasional sheet of photo paper and/or colour printer cartridge should you choose to turn it into a print (and why would you, when you can enjoy a far superior version on your computer or TV screen)
then why on earth would you want to bother with the box brownie and Mr Truprint.
No, my friends, the present and future is strictly digital and you simply have to get yourself a digital camera. And rest assured, you don’t HAVE to get a computer to enjoy the quality – many of this you can connect directly up to a printer to do your stuff.
Anyway, enough of the generic advert for digital cameras – this review is about the Pentax Optio 550, so let’s get down to the detail.
First, the price – Kelkoo via Ebuyer offers this beauty at £291.86 including £3.99 post and packing. Tesco online offers the same beast at a whopping £489, so please shop around for the best price, although Internet Cameras Direct - http://www.internetcamerasdirect.co.uk/Pentax-Optio-550-digital-camera-deals.htm?campaign=google&pentax_optio_550 - warns that the camera is discontinued. It’s very hard to be definitive, but the Pentax website seems to suggest that it’s still available, so perhaps that website has got it wrong.
Anyway, what do you get for your dosh?
The Optio 550 has a 5-megapixel CCD (Hmmm, sounds a bit techie to me, but what it really means is that there are an awful lot of dots in the picture taken by the camera, meaning that the quality of the image is pretty darn good). According to the Microsoft website, CCD stands for “Charge Coupled Device: one of the two main types of image sensors used in digital cameras. When a picture is taken, the CCD is struck by light coming through the camera's lens. Each of the thousands or millions of tiny pixels that make up the CCD convert this light into electrons. The number of electrons, usually described as the pixel's accumulated charge, is measured, then converted to a digital value. This last step occurs outside the CCD, in a camera component called an analog-to-digital converter.” Megapixel means 1 million pixels (or dots) in a set space, and when you realise that the standard measure these days is 3 megapixels, then I hope you get the picture – 5 is better than 3 so the Optio 550 is pretty damned good in this respect.
It also offers a five times zoom facility to bring your subject matter conveniently close, and that’s a pretty reasonable offering these days.
Image quality and feature sets, to be sure, are EXTREMELY good in this price range and you could do an awful, awful lot worse than this particular model, although I have to say that the Pentax isn’t one of the sexier makes around these days, and always strikes me as being a teensy bit old hat.
For all that, however, Pentax have managed to produce a digital camera which has the happy combination of low price with a mix of features which will appeal to both beginners and semi-serious photo men of all sorts. For instance, most digital cameras these days will save things as jpegs, i.e. photos with compression. The Optio 550 allows storage at three different compression levels, as well as tiffs, where there is no compression. Admittedly lack of compression increases the size of your files and there’s inevitably a balance to be struck, but at least the choice is yours.
You can also take short videos (up to ten minutes), stored as Quicktime movies, but if you really want such things you’d be well advised to get a digicam and do it properly.
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