I recently bought an Olympus 1030SW for a snorkeling trip to Aruba. It was the only half-way decent compact waterproof camera available. Reviews on the Digital Photography Review web site were mixed.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/read_opinions.asp?prodkey=oly_stylus1030sw

I almost bought a waterproof shell for an older Canon 550SD ELPH camera, but it was more than half the price of the $300 I paid for the 1030SW and is a bulky thing to try and snorkel with, especially since I swim to the bottom as much as I can! It fits nicely in one hand.

The Oly takes pretty good photos and like Canon ELPHs, very well in full sunlight, but pretty noisy in low light. At 10MP, pix are strangely hazy. Shooting at 5MP, they’re quite good. Using higher ISOs makes it worse. I tried to keep it at 80 or 100. The flash is hot, so I shut it off even when shooting under rocks 15 or 20 feet below the surface, etc. The equivalent 28mm wide angle is nice, too bad Canon is opting out of true wide angle.

Shooting underwater is great fun! If you think you might like to, get one!

I’d assume that Canon will offer a much better camera than Olympus, although for a camera of this size class, 10MP is way too much. It would be better to have a larger sensor at 6 or 7MP max..

5-6 mp with low noise underwater (low noise in red channel) and max depth 20m will be ideal for my snorkling.

Panasonic announced the DMC-TS1 on the 27th of January that will be a direct competitor with this Canon camera. Unfortunately, it looks like, as usual, Canon has left out a couple very desirable features. The two that come to mind are a wide angle lens (DMC-TS1 = 28mm) and HD movie mode (DMC-TS1 = 720p). According to the above specs the Canon can go deeper and be dropped from a little higher, but the wide angle and movie modes are more important to my needs.