Canon EOS 550D Review

So I had just jumped out of a plane and I'm waiting for Andre to do his solo. I only have the iPhone on me and one of the group Andre is with tells me he has a 550D if I want to play with it. Not expecting much I say, "why not". I proceed to alter all his settings on the camera and start taking photographs. At this point I have to point out that I use an EOS 7D and EOS 5D MII as my standard cameras.

So what do I think? I must admit that I was impressed. I had a fairly standard 70-300 f4.5-5.6 on the camera and I was not expecting too much. I did find the auto focus to be incredibly slow, drove me crazy. But looking at the camera, if you were not used to the more upmarket cameras, focusing issues would not be an problem.

 

Controls are fairly simple and if you are used to operating other Canon cameras, then it is not too difficult to work it out. For the sake of the test I shot all images as both a Raw file and a Jpg saved at it's highest setting. For those not sure what a Raw file is, that is a later blog post.

 

So a quick look at the details of the camera:

 

Imaging Sensor/Effective Pixels Effective Sensor Size

CMOS / 18.0 MP 22.3x 14.9 mm

 

A/D Resolution Power Colour Filter Size

14-bit Primary Colours, APS-C

 

35mm Focal Length Equivalent

1.6X

 

Medium

SD/SDHC/SDXC

 

AF Points

9

 

Metering Modes

Evaluative, Partial, Spot, Centre-weighted average

 

ISO Speed Range

ISO 100-6400 (H: 12800)

 

Shutter Speed

1/4000 sec û 30, bulb, X-sync 1/200 sec.

 

Shooting Speed

3.7 fps

 

 

This information is taken directly from the Canon website.

 

So performance. I was taking photographs of parachutists jumping from a plane at 3500 feet. Not an easy task. The results to me were quite staggering.

 



 Great results and for the price I was staggered. Would I buy one, no, but I am used to high end cameras. As a first camera or an update, absolutely, this is a good camera, especially for the price.