Canon Powershot D10 vs Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1

Canon and Panasonic has announced their first shock and water-proof compact toughcams during the beginning this year. If you are still confused which camera is best for you, here you will find some useful information and comparison between the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1 and Canon PowerShot D10.

Both the cameras are waterproof, but if you wish a camera that can be used around 10 meters underwater, then Canon D10 would be your best choice. The submarine shaped D10 with its porthole-like screws and bulbous shell shows that this digital camera is purely made for underwater. But on ground, Canon D10 won't fit into your pocket, unless you have a big pocket. D10 has easy-to-press buttons and a large LCD screen where icons are big and nice, even with snorkeling mask, you won't have any difficulties in seeing the icons. Additionally, it contains bigger screw-mouths on every corner for mounting the camera in various underwater grips.

While other waterproof digicam, Lumix DMC-TS1 can only be used up to 3 meters underwater with a completely different approach. The sleek rectangular slab outline has made it hard to distinguish from usual non-tough cams. The buttons are smaller in comparison with D10 and shooting modes can be selected by a thumb dial rather than a dedicated button. However, you will lose usability underwater with TS1, it will perform better on land and you must consider that.

Another huge difference is that the Lumix DMC-TS1 shoots in the AVCHD format at 720p, where D10 only does VGA videos of 640×480. But the video recording mode of TS1 is not the most polished one, there is a two to three seconds of delay from hitting the dedicated video button to starting and stopping the video and its quite unclear when exactly everything does start. If you are ok with that delay, you will surely love the excellent HD video mode. Lumix DMC-TS1 is currently going through a big bug when importing the taken video into iMovie. The featured AVCHD format of TS1 is quite annoying and you might require installing particular codec to import video into your preferred video editing software and then convert it into friendly formats.

Both toughcams are having 12-megapixel shooting and have the same CCD sensor size. But the ISO of TS1 goes up to 6400 when it is only 1600 for D10. A difference that really matters is the wider-angle lense of TS1, which is an effective focal length zoom of 28mm-128mm f/3.3-f/5.9, where D10 is only 35mm-105mm f/2.8-f/4.9. Color reproduction through the Leica lens of TS1 is far better than that of D10. Moreover, the TS1 lean to autofocus underwater with greater ease in comparison with D10.

If you are not a professional scuba photo shooter, the benefits of toughcams can also be realized when you are taking your kid’s bath time photos without worrying about making your camera wet or shooting with unclean hands while you are in the middle of a barbecue, or anything like that. Whatever happens, you can always clean your camera underwater which will give you the freedom of using a camera with more convenience. So the conclusion is, if you care about form factor, you should go with Panasonic Lumix TS1, Canon Powershot D10 will be tough to fit it into a pants pocket without some serious bulging. But if you usually go deeper than 3 meters underwater, you should go with Canon Powershot D10.