At such high zooms, the tiniest amount of movement will cause a dramatic amount of blur. As a result Olympus has incorporated a two stage form of anti-blur with the first stage being a mechanical method that shifts the image sensor accordingly. While the high-level specs are impressive some of them come at a high cost. To gain access to the 15FPS shooting mode the image resolution is capped at 1.2MP. Slower shooting modes allow the resolution to be increased. At full resolution the frame rate is 1 frame per second, for 3 frames.

For storage the SP 550 UZ utilizes the xD Card storage format which was developed by Olympus and Fujifilm. xD cards have a maximum storage capacity of  2GB, with slower transfer speeds the more common SD cards. As a result of using xD cards the time between successive shots at normal resolution can reach up to 4 seconds.