So I’ve got back from travelling and my faithful FujiFilm E550 is looking a little worse for wear. It still works fine although it makes a rather unpleasant noise as the lens moves back and forth. Probably a result of various parts of the Thar Desert, Fraser Island and Waikiki Beach being inside there. Also, the mode dial on the top has lost the little symbols for the different shooting modes. So, I have to spin the dial and wait for the right icon to appear on the screen now. It’s a little slow.

As for the form and function of the camera, I’ve missed not having a focussing lamp for low light conditions. The E550 often refuses to take a sharp picture when it’s a bit dim. It’s also a bulky camera by todays compact digital standards. I’d chosen to go for it because it uses AA batteries. Easy to carry or by new sets if need be so I very rarely ran out of juice.

That’s the bad stuff. The other side of things is that it is a pretty pro camera. The ability to manually set aperture, shutter speed and focussing has been very useful for some of those challenging photo ops. I wouldn’t have been able to produce the nice photo of the Pertronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur without these settings. However, the current trend in compacts seems to be to dumb them down. More for the point and shoot market rather than the enthusiast. All three of the big names (Fujifilm, Canon and Nikon) have gone this way leaving the only more advanced cameras in the compact or full SLR ranges.

It looks like I’m going to have to stick to what I have for the forseeable future. Luckily the wear on the lens mechanism isn’t terminal (yet) and I can get around the dial problem. I’m just annoyed that I didn’t enter the above photo in the Fujimugs challenge as it seems a chap with another E550 did quite well...

http://www.fujimugs.com/challenge/show_entry.php?entry=8598