My Samsung ST550 review for Amazon Vine

See my photos taken with this camera on Flickr

Buy the Samsung ST550 on Amazon

This is a great camera with lots of really useful features. It’s fun to use and the pictures I’ve taken look good. The camera looks cool too – it’s slim and sleek and I love the purple colour choice The back screen is big and fab, and being a touch screen is easy and fun to use. The front screen, though a little gimmicky, is actually really useful for self portraits, and group photos with yourself in the shot, although I found that sometimes it was hard to activate it by tapping and took a few taps.

The camera is really easy to use and is very intuitive. All the settings can be found using the touch screen and if you’re not sure what each of them are you can hold your finger on them and an explanation appears. The user manual comes on a CD and is a useful reference, but not needed that much as it’s so easy to use. I went from getting it out of the box to taking pictures very quickly and I appreciated the fact that the battery didn’t need to be charged up before I could have a play with it.

I enjoyed playing with the features such as the face recognition and the way it can automatically take a photo when the person smiles. Great fun! Other fun things are the photo editing you can do on the camera such as making pictures black & white, adding snow (!), and cropping. Usefully when you do edit photos it saves them as a new photo so you get to keep the original as well.

I’ve tried some close up photography using the scene selector set to close up, and found great results with that. The square that is green when in focus or red when not is a clear guide to whether you’re getting it right or not. I’ve also taken landscape photos and portraits and all look good. The zoom is also a really useful function. I’m not an expert photographer, just a snapper, but my photos have come out looking great.

The camera comes with Intelli-studio which is used when you plug the camera into your PC. This is a useful tool and includes mechanisms for uploading your photos to Flickr. I have had some difficulty in uploading multiple photos to Flickr though – it only seems to upload the first one. I did find it a little strange that this software appears to be on the camera itself and is not installed on my PC. So if you don’t have the camera plugged in you can use the software to look at the photos you’ve transferred onto your PC.

It comes with an A/V cable which I haven’t yet tried, a USB cable (quite short, but fine) and a charging plug which the USB cable plugs into. It doesn’t come with a micro SD card (which it uses) which I found a little disappointing as I had to get one before I could take more than a few pictures.

Overall, I am really happy with the camera and any negatives I’ve mentioned are far outweighed by the positives – hence the 5 stars