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September 10, 2009
[REVIEW—SAMSUNG ST550 compact camera]
Price: $500
Unique
The low-down: This 12 megapixel compact camera has an image stabilised 27–124mm (film equivalent) lens. Its unique feature is a secondary LCD on the front of the camera. The superb 9cm, high resolution, rear LCD is a touch screen, through which most functions are controlled. The only external buttons are for power, zoom, capture and review. The touch screen inherits “gesture” controls from mobile phones, meaning that many of the actions, such as image advance and delete, are done by sliding a finger over the screen. Some things are accessed by tilting the camera and others by tapping. It sounds complicated but is intuitive. Control activation is “haptic”, which means there is a slight vibration and chirrup when an item is selected.
Like: The front LCD has two functions – framing self portraits and amusing young subjects. When the camera is in Child Scene mode the front LCD plays a clown animation to make the little tackers smile. Generally image quality is good. (See tinyurl.com/n2c4nr for sample images). It passes the tourist test well, delivering sharp, well exposed, punchy images straight from the camera, provided the subject is stationary.
Dislike: Moving subjects are a problem because of the capture lag. Even anticipating movement doesn't help because you are always a beat behind the action.
Verdict: This camera is loaded with the essential gimmicks – face detection and recognition, smile and blink automation of shutter firing and so on, but it also permits a reasonable degree of user control. Samsung divides customers into six categories, one of which is Style. The ST before the 550 tells us that this little camera is for the style conscious. The high gloss finish on the front panel looks the goods, at least until it is smeared with finger prints. CSI will love it! An interesting camera, well thought out, worth consideration by any tourist.
Posted by terry at September 10, 2009 10:14 AM
Comments
ST550 IS GREAT!
I asked my friend to try mine and they were
all satisfied with it:)
ST550 is awesome!
Posted by: HannyM K at December 5, 2009 04:01 PM
No one could ever think about DUAL LCD camera! yeah it was possible with the cell phone but the pixels....was a bit bad... i guess,, So many ppl including me wanted something like cellphone but better than cell phone's camera. And finally Samsung did it yay! ST550 is so popular now and all of my friends want to try mine haha:) i became so popular too :p I hope it becomes more more popular:D
Posted by: Jessie at December 22, 2009 12:52 PM
A gift from my girlfriend at Christmas - I've taken 500 shots so far, inside, outside, snow, and so on. I'm very impressed. An awesome little camera with no end of features, including the front LCD which is great fun!
Posted by: RPais at January 4, 2010 04:30 AM