There are 13 shooting modes available which include 8 special scene modes which have been preset in order to cope with different lighting conditions and include foliage, snow, fireworks, night and beach. The My Colours feature allows for in-camera colour effects to be applied to images and movies such as vivid, neutral, black & white, sepia and custom.

The Canon PowerShot A550 is powered by 2x AA alkaline or NiMH batteries and the alkaline batteries supplied give a battery life of approximately 140 shots. If optional Canon NB-3AH batteries are used then the battery life becomes approximately 500 shots. The Canon A550 takes SD/SDHC/MultiMedia memory cards with a 16MB memory card supplied with the camera.

ISO sensitivity choices are - auto, high ISO auto, 80/100/200/400/800, White Balance has - auto, cloudy, daylight, tungsten, fluorescents and custom and the Canon A550 has a built-in flash with auto, manual flash on/off, slow sync and red-eye reduction. The high speed ISO 800 setting allows for shooting images indoors or in low light conditions without the use of flash.

The Canon A550 has DIGIC II processor which delivers a speedy performance, iSAPS technology optimising key settings before a shot is taken and 9-point AiAF ensuring that the whole of your picture is clear, not just the centre subject.

Images are stored as JPEG (Exif 2.2), DCF, DPOF and AVI (Motion JPEG) + WAVE (monaural) and can be viewed on the 2" TFT LCD screen which has a selectable grid line display to help with composition. The PowerShot A550 also has a real-image zoom optical viewfinder. VGA movies can be taken at 640 x 480 (30/15 fps), 320 x 240 (60/30/15 fps) and 160 x 120 (15fps).

The Canon PowerShot A550 can be connected to any PictBridge compatible printer and a full colour print will be produced at the touch of a button.