Water and cameras. Those are 2 things that typically don't go together. We recently made a purchase that allows us to do the unthinkable, put our camera in water. Let me explain.
We have a Canon Rebel XTi for a DSLR. This is a nice camera, but as you know DSLRs are heavy to carry and way too big to be easily portable. About 3 years ago we purchased a point & shoot Canon PowerShot SD770 IS, (yes, we like Canons)This was a great small camera that we could put in our pocket and take everywhere with us. My wife usually had it in her purse and we took it everywhere we went, the store, the beach, church, or taking the kids to school. We followed the mantra of every good photographer "always be prepared".
A few months ago we noticed a small spot through the viewfinder of our beloved PowerShot. We asked the guys at the local camera shop to try to clean it for us. They said it would cost $100 just to look at it with no guarantee it would be fixed. The spot was most likely a piece of dust. Though faint it was too much to use for Cindy's work. We gave it to our 9 year old son who was delighted to have his own camera.
Meanwhile we needed another point & shoot, but we were too frugal to buy one just yet. We borrowed our daughter's when we needed a small camera. This included a camping trip I took with my son's cub scout troop. Having a pink camera on a cub scout adventure was painful to my male ego. I lost a few masculinity points that weekend.
We finally decided we couldn't wait any more and a few days ago purchased the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS10. We had 2 main requirements for our new point & shoot 1) high quality shots 2) waterproof/dustproof/shockproof. This little baby does all that. Waterproof up to 10 feet, shockproof (which means you can drop it) up to 7 feet, dustproof, freezeproof down to 14 degrees. Some other nice features were 14 MP, 1.5 fps, 4x optical zoom, 20 scene modes, and 720p video.
We tested it out this weekend which included putting it underwater in the kids' kiddie pool. We are very impressed with it. I haven't had time to figure out all the controls so these shots were just in Auto mode. I also did minimal post processing, mainly to help with the color, especially the underwater shot.
Most major camera manufactures have their own waterproof model, including Canon. But we decided to go with Panasonic instead of Canon because according to the camera shop guys the picture quality was almost identical and the Canon was almost twice as much.
The quality and controls are not the same as on our DSLR, but the pictures are good, much better than with our old P&S and it has more features. Most importantly, we can finally take a camera to the beach without worrying about it being destroyed.
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