After purchasing two Canon 550D's in May 2010 and taking 30 000 pictures with each camera, the following is a summary of my experiences with regards to the performance of the cameras during the past 6 months.
From an overall perspective, both examples of the 550D Canon cameras have performed exceedingly well - but with the good comes a little of the bad. I will start with the negatives first and then move onto the positives of the two identical Canon cameras. I had no issues with any aspect of the cameras until after about 7500 pictures when I did some night photography with the one camera and used the live view finder for a semi significant amount of time. I had the camera on a tripod - given the awkward positioning it became impractical to use the small viewfinder - so I switched the 550D to the live view display for approximately two hours.
What became apparent after approximately 200 shots that evening were some very bright red pixels in all of the photos from that moment onwards! Upon further research it became apparent to me that this was not a unique occurrence to the 550D but that it happened with more expensive models as well, I.E. the Canon 5D. I was quite disappointed in the performance of the camera with regards to low F-Stop, long exposure night photography from that moment forth. The red pixels have to this day not disappeared and were not present before I used the cameras on live view for an extended period of time. The other 550D has no bright red pixels in any of the photographs I have taken with it at night with long exposure periods. When setting the Canon 550D to ISO settings above 800 the red pixel problem became markedly worse.
The second negative of both cameras is that on the odd occasion, when on relatively high F-Stop settings, and using auto focus, the cameras hesitates to lock onto any focus and subsequently needs to be switched on and off for it to start working again - this happened every couple of thousand photographs. It was not a big problem but an inconvenience none the less. The problem reoccurred with different types of lenses I.E. 70-200mm Canon L 2.8 IS I Lens, as well as the 17-55mm Canon S 2.8 IS Lens.
The third negative is that the cameras is not weather protected and when subjected to only slightly or moderately dusty conditions, the casing easily allows grains of dust onto its image sensor and mirror. This meant I had to use the dust deletion function regularly and blow out the insides of the cameras from time to time.
The final negative is the cameras inability to adapt the white balance to different indoor light settings very well, especially when faced with trying to use subtle or bounced flash photography with a mixture of the ambient lighting. In these situations, custom white balance is impossible to set and setting the white balance to any other pre setting rendered poor results. Selecting auto white balance seldom produced decent results.
On the plus side, the cameras both performed flawlessly under tough conditions. As I am a wedding photographer, I regularly take up to 3000 photos in the space of half a day. The cameras performed well when placed under this pressure.
Firstly, the LCD screens are extremely clear and when used in conjunction with the individual histograms produced a good photographer's aid.
Secondly, when used in conjunction with any L-glass lenses with fast glass, the results at 18MP Raw are simply staggering. The photographs are superbly clear and offer immense yet realistic amounts of color saturation which pleased many of our clients.
Thirdly, the camera controls are well laid out and I never had to look for functions or features and the menu system is logically organized.
Fourthly, when using advanced center weighted or the spot metering modes in conjunction with single focus point enabled, the cameras focused quickly and gave excellent light metering reports which meant many extremely good photographs after a shoot and very few poor photos.
Lastly, for the price of the cameras and the shear quality of photos they produced, I am still hard pressed to upgrade at this time to anything as light and compact as these pair of entrylevel digital SLRs.
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