Fujifilm FinePix E550 Zoom

Opinion: This little camera is a very nice surprise. I've been looking for a "carry anywhere" pocket camera for some time now. Tried many...but, this 550 is a definite keeper. Almost instant on...very fast and accurate auto focus..image quality is excellent. Color is well saturated but still natural. Photos are sharp and well detailed. Not one hint of CA. All in all, it's a very nice camera.

Opinion: I have been using an old Epson camera for almost 4 years. The camera has been good, but it was getting long in the tooth and showing a lot of shortcomings. I was looking for a pocket camera that my wife could primarily use right out of her pocketbook for the times that the kids were doing something cute.

I was immediately impressed with the E550 for the speed. The near instant on nature (less than a second) and the speed of the snap once the shutter button is pressed is amazing compared to the old Epson that routinely allowed the kids to be halfway across the room before even the autofocus kicked in. With the E550, I can have the camera turned on and a picture taken in less than 2 seconds.

The features of this camera are also impressive given the small stature. Perhaps it's commonplace in today's pocket digicam world, but coming from a 4-year old camera I feel that the ease of use of this camera is impressive considering the options given. For example, having both the standard scene mode selections (portraits, landscape, night, and sports) is nice, but also having the shutter priority and the aperature priority modes is a huge bonus.

The pictures seem to be pretty good. Colors are not as sharp as other pocket cameras I tried such as a 3 MP Olympus. But overall, having a 6 MP point and shoot makes up for it. The ability to crop down into a specific subject and still achieve outstanding printed results is fantastic.

The construction is fairly good. There seems to be a little wiggle around the pop-up flash, but it's not bad. Otherwise, the metallic material feels solid, and the handgrip is very nice. The camera, even though it's quite small, fits in my huge hands well and never feels slippery. Controls are well placed and thought out.

I know I overpayed for the camera at a local camera store (by a good margin) compared to online merchants. And that's why I rated the value at 4.5 instead of 5. Otherwise, I think we will be very happy with this camera.

Opinion: I like everything about this camera except the pictures, very poor quality even compare to a 2mp A20 Canon, I owed over 4 years, very disappointed.
The color is flat; has a lot of blue tone in most of the pictures I took, overporwed all the other colors;not very sharp and most of the pictures looks like underexposured even in very sunny day. Indoor pictures just as bad, the flash is not consistence, some pictures are ok, some are very poor.

Opinion: Really nice camera. Really quick start up time and zooming, many features such as RAW and nice 2' inches LCD. Really nice and sharp images, barely saw any noise! good and natural colors, great focus, mostly in daylight and good battery life (when using 2300mah AA, came with a charger in the box). Pretty good video feature- 640/480 tops, no limit except the XD card, 30fps. Great sensor.