Canon A550 low quality images ? Faulty ?

Having read a lot about the A550 on the Internet, I have just bought one
to replace my Olympus C4000 4mp.

I am not happy, two things

1) The quality is poor, even at max size and quality the image appears
to be slightly milky, and soft focus, at ALL setting, as read off SD
card onto my computer.

The 7mp shows as less blocky on diagonals, so this is better.

But the image is poor. When zoomed in on the pic, it is really obvious.

It is not as good quality as my 4mp C4000.

Is this A550 faulty ?

2) The flash always appears to default the shutter speed to only 1/60th
second, which is quite slow, on ALL setting, not slow flash. This causes
blurry images at dusk time, ok when totally dark.

As for the 1/60th flash shutter speed, why ?

It's not a focal plane shutter, and there is provision for slow shutter
sync, so I would have thought a high speed, ala the old 35mm cameras,
was obvious.

Has anyone else found this a problem ?

I am thinking of returning the A550.

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 02:20:21 GMT, DigiCamUK wrote:

> 1) The quality is poor, even at max size and quality the image appears
> to be slightly milky, and soft focus, at ALL setting, as read off SD
> card onto my computer.
>
> The 7mp shows as less blocky on diagonals, so this is better.
>
> But the image is poor. When zoomed in on the pic, it is really obvious.
>
> It is not as good quality as my 4mp C4000.
>
> Is this A550 faulty ?

The A550 may be faulty, but I'd be faulty to conclude that with
more information.


> 2) The flash always appears to default the shutter speed to only 1/60th
> second, which is quite slow, on ALL setting, not slow flash. This causes
> blurry images at dusk time, ok when totally dark.

I suspect that you're getting a 1/60th shutter speed because you
aren't yet familiar enough with how the A550 operates. What
shooting mode were you using? Was it P (AE) mode? What exposure
would the camera have chosen if you had disabled the flash?

I don't have a manual for the A550, but the manual for the
A530/A540 has this :

[For Tv mode] :
> The fastest shutter speed for flash synchronization is 1/500 second. The
> camera automatically resets the shutter speed to 1/500 second if a faster
> shutter speed is selected.

[For Av mode] :
> In this mode the shutter speed range with synchronized flash is
> 1/60 second to 1/500 second. The aperture value setting may
> therefore be changed automatically to match the sychronized
> flash speed even if its value was set previously.

I'd be very surprised if your manual doesn't say essentially the
same thing. Try forcing a higher synchronized shutter speed by
taking a shot in Av mode with a larger aperture and where there is
abundant light. If the camera still uses a 1/60 second shutter
speed it may be defective, unless there's another pertinent factor
or two that I haven't considered.