Towards the end of the pocket camera era (early to mid 2010s) camera manufacturers made one last push to make small, compact and cheap pocket cameras that offered one thing that Smartphones did not (and still do not) offer: a true seamless optical zoom.
Most of these late model pocket cameras shared a few things in common: they were very basic to use with a lack of physical controls, had a decent optical zoom range for their size (typically around 10x) and a lot of these actually ran CCD sensors to keep costs down making them the last CCD based cameras that were available new on the market over a decade before they were deemed obsolete by the camera industry as a whole.
Back in Feburary I already reviewed one of these cameras; the Canon Powershot ELPH 190. The Fujifilm T550 was a direct competitor to this camera with a similar sub compact size, solid optical zoom and aimed to be a true no-thought to use point and shoot camera. Of the two cameras the Powershot ELPH 190 wins hands down in just about every respect, which I will go over in the rest of this review.
Released in 2013 the Fujifilm Finepix T550 as mentioned before was a budget sub-compact "super zoom" pocket camera, and among the last push at making true consumer (not hobbyist) pocket cameras that were as easy to use as a Smartphone. Smartphones would obliterate this market in 2018 making the slightly newer Canon Powershot ELPH 190 (2016) the true swansong to this class of low-end true point and shoot cameras.
This camera features a 12x optical zoom and a 16mp 1/2.3" CCD sensor, making it very similar on paper to the late Powershot ELPH series (150-190).
Ease of use on both is very similar with both cameras allowing the user only to change basic things like set a timer, turn on or off the flash and enable macro mode. Some more advanced features such as setting a manual white balance or adjusting the EV are available in the camera menus but are not easy to access.
Overall this camera is pretty standard for a consumer grade point and shoot camera; where it is assumed the average person will never need any "Manual" features and just trust the camera to make all the decisions for them (very much the same mentality for Smartphone photography as well). With this in mind, the Canon Powershot ELPH 190 does a lot better job of providing really nice photos straight out of camera with not a lot of fidgeting in post or frustration while taking the photo IE having focusing issues or shutter delays.
The T550 has a number of flaws in operation that I have found in other camera reviews such as focus hunting AF (ELPH SD630), Movie button too close to the power button often causing me to record a video instead of turning the camera off (GE RS1400), overall non-responsive when compared to competing cameras (IE ELPH 190) and fairly meh overall image quality when you compare it to the ELPH 190 which is a lot sharper and has better dynamic range in spite of having a similar sensor on paper (16mp CCD vs 20mp CCD 1/2.3").
I felt less inspired to shoot this camera this last week as a result of its technical flaws combined with the fact that December is not typically a very interesting month for Photography in Minnesota or Wisconsin. So I did not get a good variety of photos with this camera; mostly just quick "snapshots" of still life or plain landscape scenes.
As such, this is a camera which will be on my sell list for 2024 to trim out of my collection. It still gets that vintage high contrasty CCD look; but there are a lot of cameras in my collection that do a better job of this with a lot less effort.
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