Olympus SP-550 UZ review

The SP-550 UZ redefines the term ultra-zoom.

Its 18x 28-504mm (35mm equivalent) focal length range is greater than that of any other ultra-zoom camera, and allows for both wide-angle photography and intimate close-ups of distant subjects. Its ISO range is bigger than anything we've seen before, too, going from 50 to 5,000. A 15 frames-per-second (fps) continuous mode completes some extraordinary headline features.

It's barely bigger than Panasonic's DMC-FZ8 but is significantly heavier once it's loaded with four AA batteries. You'll need to buy these separately once the supplied disposable cells run out. Battery life is excellent, though, capturing over 700 shots using 2300mAh NiMH batteries. The controls are well laid out and keep the most important options close to hand, although manual focus is buried in the inelegant menu system.

Performance lets the camera down badly. The four-second startup time is perhaps forgivable considering the size of the lens, but four seconds between shots is poor. It appears that a combination of slow xD media and insufficient buffer memory were primarily to blame, although the slow autofocus doesn't help. At telephoto settings, focus hunting took up to five seconds. The 15fps continuous mode is available only at 1.2-megapixel resolution and uses heavy JPEG compression to keep the 20-shot maximum down to about 3MB in total so that the memory buffer can cope. At the top image-quality setting, the continuous mode runs at 1fps and is limited to three shots. A RAW shooting mode is available but the 15-second wait between shots means we wouldn't consider using it.

Casual inspection of the SP-550 UZ's images was promising, with faithful colour reproduction in a range of lighting conditions and particularly impressive, well-saturated colours in low light. The 1cm macro focus gave stunning close-ups and the CCD-shift optical image stabilisation kept telephoto shots sharp.

However, on closer inspection we began to find faults. The automatic white balance didn't cope well with artificial light and was fooled by monochromatic scenes, rendering green foliage a surreal silver colour. Focus wasn't as sharp as that of the other 7-megapixel cameras we tested, particularly towards the right of images, where chromatic aberrations meant that red, blue and green elements of the image didn't line up perfectly. We usually had to look close to notice this problem but in high-contrast and macro shots it was more obvious. High-contrast scenes also resulted in purple fringing, giving a halo-like glow to dark objects set against a bright background. Noise was reasonably understated and roughly on a par with that from Panasonic's DMC-FZ8, but ISO 800 gave borderline images and higher settings were pointless.

We have been willing to overlook the slow performance of previous Olympus cameras because their prices have been particularly attravailable, or their image quality exceptional, but the SP-550 UZ offers neither defence.