Filed under: Photography
I recently found an excellent deal on a Canon Elph SD550. Corin has been itching for a camera to call her own to use in her classroom. So I picked up the SD550 and she gets the hand-me-down ELPH S400.
I’ve only spent a little time with the SD550, but so far, it is a pretty sweet upgrade.
- 7.1 Megapixel (same as my Digital Rebel, but it fits in my pocket)
- Start-up time is much snappier than the S400.
- Big 2.5″ LCD. Changes the user experience more than I expected.
- Refined interface that takes advantage of the bigger screen. I thought this meant that items would be buried in sub-menus, but that isn’t the case.
- Records video at 640×480 30fps video with sound
- LCD screen: 2.5 in. approximately 115,000 pixels
On the downsides:
- I prefer CompactFlash over SD flash memory
- The battery is lower capacity than the S400 (790mAh vs the S400’s 840mAh). Combine that with the much larger LCD, and I suspect the battery life won’t be too great.
I started playing with shooting video, then playing it back on the LCD. I then realized in theory I could put videos on to this camera and use it to watch movies during my commute. It apparently has a higher resolution than a video iPod (115,000 pixels vs. the iPods 76,800 pixels. I haven’t gotten much further than that, but it is an intriguing idea.
According to the Quicktime player, the video that the camera shoots is in an AVI container with Motion JPEG video and Unsigned Integer audio.
Quicktime Pro allows you to export a quicktime video using Motion JPEG, but I’m not sure about “Unsigned Interger” audio. Motion JPEG also isn’t an option when exporting in an AVI container.
The other three practical issues are:
- Getting video back on the camera. I think that each image and movie has a corresponding metadata file that the camera creates. Not sure what the file contains, or how easy it is to re-create.
- How many minutes of video you could watch before the battery died
- How to get the A/V out port to work with 3.5 mm headphones.
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