Hi,
I have been looking for a good point and shoot digital camera for a long time and I can’t find anything that fully satisfies me. This is understandable since I have had a good SLR for a while, so I have tried to some to sort of ‘compromise’… But I still can’t find it?!

There are a few things that are very important for me:

- Size: I have to be able to carry it with me in my pocket
- Speed: It has to have a fast start-up and shot time.
- Picture quality: Has to be excellent and also fairly high resolution. %MP the very minimum. Hopefully 7 or more.
- Manual settings: Obvious reasons
- Video: Minimum 640x480x25fps with no duration limit (except for the size of your card, of course!) The canon S80 is a huge temptation with video @ 1024x768x15 fps, but I’m not sure it is fast enough or the quality of the pics is actually as good as it should be…

- UNDERWATER: I want to dive to 10-15 meters with it, so I am hoping the manufacturer makes an ‘afordable’ underwater housing (case) for it.

Then where I could compromise:
- hopefully accept other lenses so that I could add a wide-angle or tele lens to it with a magnet or some sort of adapter.

- Battery life: Good, 300 shots or more....

- Card type: Compact flash, SD or MMC hopefully, since I already have 1GB size cards in all 3 formats!

- weight: hopefully less than 150grams

- Support for RAW mode

- Good zoom (5X or more. 10X desirable)

- Possibility to store sound (small wav file per picture)

- Support for external flash

- Wireless: Since some are now adding this feature, why not make use of it? I would like it to take pictures remotely, for example of wildlife without disturbing them.

and many more things that I can’t quite remember now.

After a long time of looking I thought that may be the new CASIO EX-Z850 would be the best compromise.
But now I realise that there is NOT UNDERWATER case for it!

Does anybody know if there will be a housing for it anytime soon? (this summer...)

Or should I get another camera?!
What about Nikon P1 pr P3?? (what is the difference between these two, anyway?!) Which one of the two is better?

And what about Olympus 350?
Canon S80??

Any other ones I should consider?!

I’m going crazy! It’s been over 2 years and the longer I wait, the more features I want.

Please, any help, comments or advice will certainly be welcome.

Si quieres que hablemos en español, estupendo!

Regards,
Eduardo.

Entiendo un poco de Espanol, y pronuncio y escribar malo, yo silento.  Necessito practio mas

Anyway there is a universal housing that fits many cameras, including some of the Casios, and they are also able to customize it to fit cameras if it is not listed, may be worthwhile if the camera is otherwise all you want (lots of stuff there, in fact I will cheeck out that model, there were other Casio’s I looked at for the same reasons)

http://www.dive-equinox.com/seaspy/

Thanks a lot!

I looked at it and the Casio EX-Z850 is not in their list of compatible cameras. Shame!
The funny thing is, I’m not even sure this camera would be a good enough compromise for me either!

I have not had a chance to even see it, as it just came out in the last couple of days (quite literally!) and of course no proper reviews either…

Therefore any advice about what camera I should have would be very much appreciated!

Hasta luego!
Edu.

is not in their list of compatible cameras

Well if the camera meets what you would like, then definately contact them.  I had spoken with them in the past for making some modifications when I almost picked up the Casio EXILIM PRO EX-P600 (not on their list), and they would make it work (at least for the basic functions) for about $25 or so more.  So if the Casio meets your needs otherwise

The real issue is which one of the cameras will give it all for you, and the difficulty is getting portability, RAW and decent shutter speed/pics with Zoom

The EXLIM Pro is small and has 4x Optical Zoom, very quick shutter, decent quality, but there is no RAW mode.  And for the most part (unless I missed it) there is no small camera like that which supports RAW.  And for the most part until you reach dSLR the cameras are slow on RAW cycling.  The Canon PowerShot Pro1 is the closest to being usuable since it can take about 4 shots in RAW before having to clear the card (which takes about 45 seconds or so), but many others do not approach that.  It is also a little slower on shutter lag and a bigger body, but does have an equivalent of a 28-200 built in.  So it is not quite on point

The Olympus C-7000 is something sort of between also, 11 seconds RAW Cycle (can be slow when underwater) but has 5x Optical andd not quite as big a body, but not the Casio size small.

The S70 ((but not S80) by Canon supports RAW, but is slow on the full auto focus shutter lag. P1 sort of in ballpark but no RAW.

I totally hear your dilemma though FWIW on the wireless I am not sure that is a big deal, more often they are referring to wireless connectivety, many come with remotes so they are not wireless.  Also bear in mind none of these wireless remotes will have a great range (at least none that I have seen) that you can be so far away from the wildlife as to be trully hidden.

FWIW, I think the most critical thing is shutter lag, that will practically drive you nuts the most, paritcularly underwater.  I do like RAW an awful lot, but because my camera cycles slow (8080 about 13 seconds) sometimes it is better just to bang high quality JPEGS, because if you have a good exposure, RAW is not as critical (RAW is better when you hit the borderline shot that needs to be corrected and it handles better than JPEG, but usually you can do okay with JPEG and correction to some degree.) It is nice to have the zoom.  All this is why I eventually went with the 8080, though I am going to pull the trigger on a dSLR shortly (the size of carrying it , the housing, is the main drawback for me, but once you shoot one, it opens up a whole new ballgame and I feel like I am shooting one of my film SLRs which I grew up with in terms of repsonse and cycling.)

Saw it with the housing at Beneath The Sea and played with it for a good while - very small and good shutter lag and on the portability scale it was very impressive and the LCD was real easy to see.

It does lack a few things, but I was tempted to grab one to have as a back-up that is easy to carry-on, when I have to check things in the back of my mind I would always like to have a just in case, and with the YS-15 it can almost fit in your pocket

Have you had a chance to shoot this one underwater?

Hi again!

Today I finally tried the casio 850
It is very nice. Small, light and pretty quick withh lost of features.
But it does not have RAW support and the battery ready is not accurate.

Also there is no underwater case and casio do not seem to be planning one just yet, according to Casio UK (I phoned them up)

So my doubt stays. I’m so fed up that I am very tempted to just buy the CASIO, but then again, I really have to compromise with some things…

May be I should just go for abohter one and compromise on other things…

I did like Nikon’s new software. I tried in the shop both P1 and P3. Not the S3, although it is tiny and and probably very good. But I think it has no manual settings.

I am also tempted by that Olympus 700 or 750 may be… It is shock and water proof. They told me it can go down to 3 meters!! So it could be a great camera for taking it everywhere and not worry too much about taking care of it.

The down sides I see are the memory card, the resolution not that great and I’m not sure it was manual settings....

Any more ideas/ comments anyone??

PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also there is no underwater case and casio do not seem to be planning one just yet, according to Casio UK (I phoned them up)

Contact these people the case may be able to be modified at low cost if you like the camera

http://www.dive-equinox.com/seaspy/

Well, I just called that company in the US and they were very nice and helpful.

I was told that I would need to send the camera and whithin a couple of days they send it back with the case. (As long as I pay the $325, of course!)

It is quite a bit of money, specially sine you don’t get access to all your buttons, but at least it gives me the possibility, which is the main thing!

So thank you very much for your advice!

Now I need to be sure that THAT is the right camera!

Anybody else has been able to test it?
Or anybody has tested another one that will more or less match my wish list?

I really like the Nikon P1 and P3 a lot!!
The P3 does not look as nice, but I think it is more modern… So I assume it is a bit better. Although on paper they seem to be the same!

Anybody knows the difference between Nikon P1 and the P3?!

THANKSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I think the best finalists for me are:

Casio EX- Z850

Fuji FinePix F11

Nikon P3 (or P1, whichever one is better)

Would anybody agree (or disagree)?

Reading forums and reviews I have found that there is another good option for my dilema(dylema?)!

It is the Canon SD700 Is (in the US) or Digital IXUS 800 IS (in Europe)

Any comments on this?

The Nikon P3 seems to show too much noise at 8MP with ISO 200 or higher.

Since I want to take underwater pictures, I assume (I’m a newby!) I’ll need High ISOs and therefore it is might be better to get a 6MP camera with very good noise handling, like the Fuji F11 instead of an 8MP one that can not do it so well…
So far I don’t seem to find any 8mp cams that actually have a very good quality picture in low light with highish iso…

So may be Fuji F11 or Canon SD700Is is the answer?! Anybody has any idea of what the quality of these two cameras is like and if they have a good underwater housing?

Well, nobody seems to ‘listen’ to me…
so I ‘ll keep talking to myself

I think now that I have accepted that I will have to buy a different type of card, I am considering again the Fuji E900!
There is an underwater casse, it seems to be fairly good with high isos (up to 800), you can even put lenses on it. It also has raw mode. And also uses 2 AA batteries, which is very convenient…

So I think I’ve just convinced myself…
I’ll go and buy it!

Take care everybody! :-D

Drew! Thanks a lot for your help!

Take care!

The Casio EX-Z1000 was just released.
It sounds GREAT, but I cant find an underwater case for it (either from Casio or 3rd party).
Any suggestions?

brad@net-net.com

Hi,

You should have a look to the last panasonic TZ1.
Diving housing, Sd card, 10x zoom, stabilized, 800*400 video....

LD

Here are the problems that I find with the Panasonic:

1. From DigiDeep’s website:  “At the moment there is no housing available for this camera. But you can click here to register and receive an email as soon as we know about an underwater housing for the [Panasonic] DMC-TZ1 camera.”

2. From the Panasonic website:  The DMC-TZ1 shows it has a “marine case”, but the Marine Case is not actually shown anywhere on their webiste.  There is only one Marine Case ... for the Panasonic DMC-F1.

3. The Panasonic is only 5MP, compared to the Casio’s 10MP (bigger is better if you need to crop out 1/2 the pic to better see a particular fish in view.

4. The Panasonic’s LCD is 2.5” vs. Casio’s 2.8” (bigger is better to see while underwater).

5. Panasonic’s F-stop is larger in the Telephoto mode. (larger is not better when trying to absorb as much light as possible in low-light ... underwater ... conditions).

Thanks tho.

the new EX-Z1000 has underwater housing that is made by casio themselves at a decent $175us
and the camera is decent to