I am buying a gift for someone who will be scuba diving and will be taking pictures under water. I read good reviews on both the Canon D10 and the Canon WP-DC 26. I'm not sure which one will be better. Price is not an issue, but I want to know which one will be more worth it and can take better quality pictures. The camera that would be used in the waterproof case would be the canon SD 880IS, which she already owns. I'm just not sure if people prefer a waterproof case or a waterproof camera? Thank you!Canon D10 waterproof camera or Canon WP-DC26 waterproof camera case?
If price is not an issue then go and get the camera thats a better options. You can also consider this camera Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1 12MP Digital Camera with 4.6x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.7 inch LCD
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001QFZ鈥?/a>Canon D10 waterproof camera or Canon WP-DC26 waterproof camera case?
Have you read the dpreview take on this subject?
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/Q209wate鈥?/a>
Canon PowerShot D10 12.1 MP Waterproof Digital Camera with 3x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.5-inch LCD
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001SER460?tag=鈥?/a>
Review:
I've been playing with my new Powershot D10 for about a week and really like it. I have been using Canon SLRs for 25+ years, AE1 Program, A1, Elan 7e, and Digital Rebel. When I started looking for a waterproof camera to take snorkeling, my first choice was Canon, based on my many years of satisfaction with their products, and I was very lucky that this camera was released two weeks before leaving for vacation. (Amazon had been showing the camera as available for pre-order until earlier today. I purchased mine from a local camera store.)
I'm very impressed with the picture quality on this camera. The 12 megapixel sensor, coupled with a dozen shooting modes, produce an excellent image. I'm used to controlling aperture and shutter speed on the SLR, so simply selecting ';portrait'; or ';night exposure'; mode and letting the camera do all the work just seems too easy. Or, if selecting ';portrait'; is too difficult, you can select ';auto'; and just let the camera do it all. Movie quality is also quite good. The LCD screen on the back of the camera seems huge compared to the 1'; screen on my old Digital Rebel. It's a great display.
The controls are conveniently arranged, and easy to use, and the associated icons displayed are both informative and intuitive. You can choose to display all the settings or turn them off and just see the image. One of the useful display options is a grid overlay on the screen to assist with shot composition and the ';Rule of Thirds.'; The optical zoom works great. By the time you get to 12x with the digital zoom, the image is kind of grainy, but that's to be expected.
You can take macro photographs an inch or two from your subject. I've had trouble focusing my Digital Rebel in the dark, but Canon seems to have improved low-light focusing quite a bit. It has a manual focus feature that indicates the distance to the subject as you adjust the focus, just in case it can't get the focus right.
I like the Panorama feature, which displays the previous shot on the viewfinder while you're composing the next shot, allowing the photographer to closely match subsequent shots, resulting in panoramic photos with less distortion when they're stitched together. Panorama mode also locks in the exposure value of the first shot so that the exposure in subsequent shots all match the first shot.
The face recognition and blink detection both seem to work well. As the camera focuses, it will zoom in on one of the faces so the photographer can verify correct focus. After the shot is taken, if someone blinked it will identify the face of the person blinking so you can take another shot. These can be turned on or off according to user preference. Images seem very crisp, which I attribute to the image stabilization features, which can also be turned on or off.
I've had the camera in the sink, and it handles six inches of water with no problems. I'll see how it does with thirty two and a half more feet of water when it meets the Atlantic Ocean in a few weeks! The wrist strap attaches to any one of the four corners of the camera (convenient for carrying in either left or right hand) and seems to be pretty secure, so no worries about losing it if you get knocked over by a wave.
I use Photoshop Elements, so I haven't loaded the Canon software and can't comment on that. And since I edit photos on the computer, I doubt that I'll use some of the in-camera editing features, such as black and white, sepia, color swap, and the various color enhancements. I could see that would be useful to those who print directly from the camera, without editing on a computer.
The camera doesn't allow you to shoot in RAW. I generally don't shoot in RAW with my SLR, so that doesn't worry me. It has a number of white balance modes, custom white balance, and auto white balance. It seems to do a good job selecting the correct shooting conditions in auto mode. Colors appear correct.
A couple of drawbacks: The camera isn't threaded so you're not able to attach filters. There's also no lens cap, and I worry about the lens surface getting damaged. For a rugged ';adventure'; camera, I'm also surprised that there's no GPS chip so that photos can be tagged with the exact location. I look at old slides taken while I was hiking and think ';that's neat, why can't I remember where I took that.'; It would be nice if the EXIF data included lattitude and longitude. (Watch Canon come out with the Powershot D10 ';Gold'; six months from now that incorporates these features. The curse of being an early adopter.)
The microphone picks up every movement your fingers make as you hold the camera, so it's difficult to capture movies without some camera noise. The speaker on the bottom of the camera is also difficult to hear when playing movies back on the camera, but movies s
