Pentax Optio 550 Review

Review based on a production Optio 550, firmware 1.00

Pentax announced the aluminium alloy clad Optio 450 and 550 two weeks before PMA 2003. Both cameras share the same feature set, body design and impressive five times optical zoom lens. The Optio 450 has a four megapixel sensor, the 550 a five megapixel sensor. At the time of writing this review the Optio 550 is the only compact five megapixel digital camera with a five times optical zoom lens - the Sony DSC-F717 and Nikon Coolpix 5700 aren't classed as compact, the next nearest would be Sony's DSC-V1 with a four times optical zoom lens. The Optio 550 sports a wide range of manual controls, flexible settings and a powerful Lithium-Ion rechargeable battery which puts it up at the prosumer end of the market, a street price of around US$600 means it's a very attractive proposition for anyone considering a five megapixel prosumer compact digital camera.

If you're new to digital photography you may wish to read the Digital Photography Glossary before diving into this review (it may help you understand some of the terms used).

Conclusion / Recommendation / Ratings are based on the opinion of the reviewer, you should read the ENTIRE review before coming to your own conclusions. Images which can be viewed at a larger size have a small magnifying glass icon in the bottom right corner of the image, clicking on the image will display a larger (normally 960 x 720 or smaller if cropped) image in a new window. To navigate the review simply use the next / previous page buttons, to jump to a particular section either pick the section from the drop down or select it from the navigation bar at the top. DPReview calibrate their monitors using Color Vision OptiCal at the (fairly well accepted) PC normal gamma 2.2, this means that on our monitors we can make out the difference between all of the (computer generated) grayscale blocks below. We recommend to make the most of this review you should be able to see the difference (at least) between X,Y and Z and ideally A,B and C.

This review is Copyright 2003 Phil Askey and the review in part or in whole may NOT be reproduced in any electronic or printed medium without prior permission from the author. For information on reproducing any part of this review (or any images) please contact: Phil Askey.