Panasonic TS1 & Pentax W80 Added
DPReview has added to their underwater camera reviews. I’m glad to see the Pansonic added.
The winner? A tie between the Canon D10 and Panasonic TS1.
My Little Review:
I have used both cameras quite extensively and find them both to be great performers.
I prefer the Canon D10 for 4 reasons:
1) Flash performance is better. The larger flash and position contribute to above average performance.
2) The Canon menu system, I’m just used to it.
3) The 33 feet depth rating. I live around some deep water and get down there sometimes.
4) It’s cheaper (before you add the accessory kit).
*Side Note: Dear Canon, why on earth do I have to pay $149 CAD to change the color of my Canon D10?
You should provide retailers with a display stand with the different colors and charge about $30 each for them. Retailers would get a margin booster and I wouldn’t have to feel I’m wasting money for colors I don’t want.
Thanks!
I prefer the Panasonic TS1 for 2 reasons:
1) The HD video. It’s very decent quality.
2) The slim design. It’s a lot more convenient than the D10. I do like the moveable wrist strap on the D10. I’d still prefer it to be slimmer though.
Read More: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/Q209waterproofgroup/
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does it have RAW or manual settings?
Very cool … Dear Canon: Can you please make my 5D mk2 and lenses water proof? Papapleeeeeezzze?
Neither the Panasonic nor the Canon support RAW.
My own experiences with underwater photography are with the Canon point and shoots in a Canon housing. My last camera SD800 would take 40 minutes of video using a 4gb card and a fresh battery. I used it at depths of 30M (100 ft). Below that the light was really not adequate.
For photographs, the G9 or G10 would be better because of Raw and a hot shoe. The flash on all of these pocket cameras is too close to the lens axis. Non flash photos suffer from a serious blue shift as shallow as 2M. It gets worse as you go deeper.
Ikelite is now making a line of compact camera housings. They are a bit more expensive than Canon but appear to be better built.
It sounds like a ebay business potential, buy accessory kits and resell the colors individually. I wonder if someone is already doing this.
I’m not a underwater photographer, so I just have a question. With underwater flash, how much gets reflected by the water back toward the camera? I was just curious as to how much of a problem it is, if it is even a problem at all.
I would think that a camera with the best possible high ISO performance is desirable for underwater photography, since light falls off rapidly as depth increases. A underwater version of micro 4/3 might be really nice for this.
back scatter is a significant problem with underwater flash photography, though it varies with the amount of particulate debris in the water. that’s why diving strobes are on like 4 foot bendable arms, to get them WAY off axis and reduce as much back scatter as possible. the water itself doesn’t bounce the flash back since there is no change in medium like there is flashing a light from the surface at water.
You are also correct about ISO performance, I just wish SLR cases didn’t cost as much as the camera itself, I have a G9 and underwater case that I use only occassionally because the image quality just isn’t what I’m used to.
Thanks,
I had a couple of underwater housings, one by Ikelite that came with a used Nikon N90S that I bought. It was a big, heavy, and clunky device that looked more like a Rube Goldberg Invention than anything else. I sold it off, since I only wanted the camera and a whole bag of Nikkor lenses that were with it. The owner had taken the housing all over the world with him diving and taking photographs.
I’m retired, and just too old to even consider taking up diving as a hobby. I’m also concerned about the safety, after a unusually talanted young engineer that I worked with went diving for the first time in deep water of Puget Sound, and got “Rapture of the Deep” or something like it. He headed straight down in 600 ft water and no one could catch him. He was never seen again. He had practice essions in shallow water before going to the deep water, but who knows what actually happened. It certainly shocked many dozens of people who liked him and worked with him.
2 days and only 8 comments. more rumors or direct print buttons please.
I doubt is there a big enough market, I would like to buy some body design like nikon s10
it shows more purchase power on IS Lenses
Can we have a “real” camera rumor please!. Something to drool about.
Amen. I have been staring at this one for 6 days. We have had 11 posts, woohoo!
I’m still shooting film for UW, although I have also been playing around with a housed P&S digital for shallow waters.
While the subject cameras can do fine for snorkeling, a system with a hot shoe and a solid housing (such as Ikelite) is pragmatically the only real way to go for scuba diving depths.
One of the things that I’ve been looking for … unsuccessfully … is a digital UW system that can come close to my current film benchmark of the Nikonos V with a 15mm wide angle lens.
For example, the Canon G10 only goes as wide as 28mm. When that is put on a conventional housing with a flat port, the field of view becomes narrowed … IIRC, roughly 45mm equivalent.
Ikelite does offer an accessory WA port for their G10 housing, but this merely restores the 28mm lens to a 28mm lens by effectively putting it behind a dome port.
And while 28mm is better than nothing, it nevertheless appears that no one apparently offers any wider WA options than this within a P&S form factor. The alternative is to house something like a 5Dmk2 and put a 17-40mm on it behind an 8″ diameter dome port … not at all cheap, plus it gets to be pretty big & bulky.
-hh
Here’s an illustration I did that shows the basic optics of the backscatter / strobe factor:
http://www.huntzinger.com/photo/2007/backscatter.jpg
Insofar as lighting and ISO, it can depend a lot on where you go. For example, my default in very clear tropical waters is ISO 100, 1/60sec and f/8 when shallow (~50fsw), progressing to 1/30sec and f/5.6 when deep (100+fsw), particularly if overcast. OTOH, in richer/darker waters, one can easily lose 2-3 stops, so I’d jump to ISO 400 film.
In either case, over 99% of the red portion of the spectrum is absorbed by 20ft of water, so bringing along your own light (strobe) is a pragmatic necessity if you want to avoid having everything progressively go to a monochromatic blue, and as such, strobe illumination power and balance will make things to be other than limited to available light photography.