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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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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.