martingrumet
Forum Enthusiast
Water sports with optional housing.
I have been using an Olympus C5050 with underwater housing to take canoe and kayak pictures. The pictures are generally very good, but the housing, which is designed for scuba divers, is cumbersome.
I decided to try to make life easier for myself with the Pentax Optio W10, but the image quality was unsatisfactory. I returned it.
I then discovered that BHPhoto has a few underwater housings for some point and shoot cameras that are good to depth of 3 meters (10 feet). Inadequate for scuba divers, this could be just the thing for snorkelers and boaters. Of the available combinations, I went with the Sony DSC-W70, and it looks like a good choice so far.
Image quality is quite good. It seems to have some chromatic aberration in sunny scenes with cyan fringing. At lower light levels (not my main use) chroma noise in shadows gets kind of high. The camera fits easily into the underwater housing, and combined weight is 11.4 ounces. No noticeable harm to image quality with camera in case. I have tested it in 6 ft deep swimming pool with good results. The combo has a very slight positive buoyancy, and is optimised for snorkelers. A little turbulance can easily pull it down, so boaters may want to add a float to the wrist strap. One potential worry is that the effort required to push the safety button and turn the release knob on the housing is very light. Like most housings, view through the optical viewfinder is blocked. Unlike scuba housings, there is no tripod socket on the housing and no detachable weights.
An optical viewfinder on a pocket camera? Is that an oxymoron? Actually, it makes very good sense. It could provide a steady hold in situations where these ultralight cameras too often suffer from camera shake.
Autofocus response is fast in bright light. Indoors its response is kind of sluggish, but it does have a high success rate. The autofocus assist lamp allows flash pictures in total absence of ambient light. There are also a few manual focal distance presets.
Sony has discovered that their old Memory Stick Pro is too big to make a small camera. Rather than get on the SD bandwagon (which I would have preferred), they invented the Memory Stick Pro Duo. It works well, and price per megapixel is competitive, but it requires the adaptor (provided with every Memory Stick Pro Duo) to fit my card reader.
At time of this writing I have not taken it out on the boat yet. I'll edit after I have some experience there.
06/21/06 late afternoon on the Payette River. The camera/housing combo worked well enough. However, my first shots were disappointing, with camera shake and motion blur in direct sunlight. The problem was not enough manual control, and bad decisions by the camera. In Program Auto mode its preference in sunny scenes is to choose small aperture and slow speed. F13 and 1/100th sec would be fine in some situations, but from the boat there is inevitable loss of detail. Auto Adjustment mode sometimes chose better. I got my best results in Soft Snap. This chooses wide aperture and faster speed. However there is no true sports mode. Soft Snap can sort of work as a sports mode in bright light, but the ISO is automatic, and it favors ISO 100 even when the light fades. Of course in the fading light Program Auto tends to switch to wide aperture, and it has manual ISO control.
Given the difficulties of getting the camera to select the best settings, I've lowered the scores half a star in Features, Ease of use, and Value for the Money. However, the images that had enough shutter speed for the scene were so good I upgraded Image Quality by half a star.
BTW, I found that the new SanDisk 12-in-1 card reader can handle Memory Stick Pro Duo without the adaptor.
Problems:
A few quibbles as noted above, but no malfunctions yet.
I have been using an Olympus C5050 with underwater housing to take canoe and kayak pictures. The pictures are generally very good, but the housing, which is designed for scuba divers, is cumbersome.
I decided to try to make life easier for myself with the Pentax Optio W10, but the image quality was unsatisfactory. I returned it.
I then discovered that BHPhoto has a few underwater housings for some point and shoot cameras that are good to depth of 3 meters (10 feet). Inadequate for scuba divers, this could be just the thing for snorkelers and boaters. Of the available combinations, I went with the Sony DSC-W70, and it looks like a good choice so far.
Image quality is quite good. It seems to have some chromatic aberration in sunny scenes with cyan fringing. At lower light levels (not my main use) chroma noise in shadows gets kind of high. The camera fits easily into the underwater housing, and combined weight is 11.4 ounces. No noticeable harm to image quality with camera in case. I have tested it in 6 ft deep swimming pool with good results. The combo has a very slight positive buoyancy, and is optimised for snorkelers. A little turbulance can easily pull it down, so boaters may want to add a float to the wrist strap. One potential worry is that the effort required to push the safety button and turn the release knob on the housing is very light. Like most housings, view through the optical viewfinder is blocked. Unlike scuba housings, there is no tripod socket on the housing and no detachable weights.
An optical viewfinder on a pocket camera? Is that an oxymoron? Actually, it makes very good sense. It could provide a steady hold in situations where these ultralight cameras too often suffer from camera shake.
Autofocus response is fast in bright light. Indoors its response is kind of sluggish, but it does have a high success rate. The autofocus assist lamp allows flash pictures in total absence of ambient light. There are also a few manual focal distance presets.
Sony has discovered that their old Memory Stick Pro is too big to make a small camera. Rather than get on the SD bandwagon (which I would have preferred), they invented the Memory Stick Pro Duo. It works well, and price per megapixel is competitive, but it requires the adaptor (provided with every Memory Stick Pro Duo) to fit my card reader.
At time of this writing I have not taken it out on the boat yet. I'll edit after I have some experience there.
06/21/06 late afternoon on the Payette River. The camera/housing combo worked well enough. However, my first shots were disappointing, with camera shake and motion blur in direct sunlight. The problem was not enough manual control, and bad decisions by the camera. In Program Auto mode its preference in sunny scenes is to choose small aperture and slow speed. F13 and 1/100th sec would be fine in some situations, but from the boat there is inevitable loss of detail. Auto Adjustment mode sometimes chose better. I got my best results in Soft Snap. This chooses wide aperture and faster speed. However there is no true sports mode. Soft Snap can sort of work as a sports mode in bright light, but the ISO is automatic, and it favors ISO 100 even when the light fades. Of course in the fading light Program Auto tends to switch to wide aperture, and it has manual ISO control.
Given the difficulties of getting the camera to select the best settings, I've lowered the scores half a star in Features, Ease of use, and Value for the Money. However, the images that had enough shutter speed for the scene were so good I upgraded Image Quality by half a star.
BTW, I found that the new SanDisk 12-in-1 card reader can handle Memory Stick Pro Duo without the adaptor.
Problems:
A few quibbles as noted above, but no malfunctions yet.
