 Love this camera |
| Review Date: June 11, 2009 |
| Reviewer: T. Szymanski, Albuquerque, NM |
This camera is great! Here's why I (filmmaker/parent)bought this one instead of others:
1. Wanted to shoot HD video anywhere, any time, without having to lug around my HVX.
2. Shoots on memory cards, unlike the Sony P.O.S. I bought that shoots HDV and if the camera breaks you're up a creek. If the camera croaks, at least I can get the footage/pics off of it.
3. I have kids, so I never know when I'm going to want to shoot it, and this camera is easily small enough to fit into a cargo pocket or pants pocket (I'd recommend getting a body glove neoprene cell phone sleeve to put it in - fits perfect).
4. I have kids, so it has to be waterproof/dusproof/indestructable since I want to take it to the pool, camping, hiking, etc.
Pros:
- Shoots video super-instantly and easily, recording with one button push vs. my wife's olympus which makes you go through menus.
- Video is SUPER-smooth, probably because of the super-wide angle lens. I mean, rediculously smooth.
- Stills look great too.
- Did I mention nearly indestructable.
Cons:
- No lens cap at all - bad design - an indestructable camera where the lens is always exposed? always carry it in something.
- STUPID USB cable that's proprietary and DOESN'T charge the battery when it's plugged in.
- AVCHD Lite looks good, will import into Final Cut Pro like it's a P2 card, but is otherwise kind of a pain to deal with. The Panasonic software blows.
- Expensive battery, but definitely get a spare.
- Took some figuring to get the settings right for shooting with (min. shutter speed, mainly. I'd rather a photo or video be dark than blurry).
- No intervalometer (sp?). That would have been cool.
- Speaker/head phones jack - as a filmmaker, to put videos on this to play back to show people would be cool, but the speaker isn't great.
Overall:
Great camera. The next version will hopefully have a few more improvements. |
Fantastic product
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| Review Date: June 17, 2009 |
| Reviewer: David Yu, |
I went going on a Carribean cruise which was going to include snorkling and scuba in addition to lots of beach time. I wasn't planning to get a new camera but I saw that some new underwater cameras were coming out and thought I would check it out. Now, first of all, I am a huge Canon fan and probably would have bought their underwater camera (DC10 I believe), if it didn't look like a toy.
I didn't test the 3m theory by taking it scube but I did use it extensively on the beach and snorkling. It took some great pics and I had a lot of fun just bringing it in the water and watching people get paranoid for me. One great moment was when we got caught in a torrential rainstorm and I was happily taking pictures while everyone else was trying very hard to protect their cameras.
Couple of notes:
Get a foam floating strap. Keeps the camera relatively close to the surface so it won't sink to the bottom.
Olympus Foam Float Strap, 202212, Red
If you want to take widescreen pics, these won't come in at the full 12M. It gets downsized to 9M.
Outdoor pics were fantastic - much better quality then I thought
Plenty of features to play with including beach mode, food mode, burst mode (easier then I remember my Canon).
For some reason, power on takes a couple of seconds, tough to get used to after my instant on Canon
Battery life good for one day, my Canon would go for a couple days.
HD video came out great although make sure you have a procedure to convert them to friendlier video files.
All in all though, very happy with my purchase! |
Survived Australia's Great Barrier Reef
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| Review Date: September 25, 2009 |
| Reviewer: VLSI_Engineer, Los Angeles, CA |
I purchased this camera for a snorkeling trip to Australia's Great Barrier Reef. To make a long story short, we were not disappointed. As somewhat of a film/slr/dslr junkie, I have quite an arsenal of equipment (Nikon D70, D90, D700, FM2). Besides this camera, I brought a point and shoot Canon SD1200, and a D70 on the trip.
- It's really nice that the strap cinches and locks around your wrist. Waterproof cameras usually do not float and the TS1 is no exception. If you let go of the camera over a stretch of deep reef, it is gone. Cameras are lost in the reef all the time. The cinching, locking strap prevents this from happening.
- The camera body does an extremely good job of resisting salt build up. We had the camera in the water for a good two hours in heavy 30 knot winds and stronger than usual current. The salt build up cleared up after soaking in fresh water for 30 minutes (I wish I could say the same for my hair).
- Water/salt does not stick to the hardened lens which is very important because water droplets usually cause focusing difficulty. Furthermore, as most peope know, when you have a snorkel mask on and are in ocean water, it's impossible to see any LCD on any camera under water. Regardless of the camera, I often find myself shooting video underwater blind at the widest angle. The same is true for the TS1. However, the difference is that the TS1 is reliable enough in terms of color, exposure, and focus that I don't need to see the LCD underwater.
- When you bring the camera out of the water, the TS1 has reed-thin drainage lines that move water away from openings. I found that it is best not to open the camera until the pooled water near the buttons has drained to the bottom of the camera and the exterior is completely dry.
- The still pictures underwater were sharp, in focus, and exposed properly. The AVCHD video underwater was stunning. When I look at the high definition videos, I am still in awe of what this camera is capable of. The video is extremely smooth. In fact, it's a lot less choppy than my high def Panasonic SD5 camcorder.
- In daily usage, the camera performs well. In fact, well enough, that for daylight photos, I left my DSLR in the hotel room and just kept this camera in my pocket. Of course, (as with any compact) I cannot say the same for night photos.
Having a tough, waterproof compact allows you to focus on enjoying your vacation instead of protecting your equipment. Also, as of this writing, this is the only compact that does AVCHD lite video that is also waterproof. This turned out to be one of the better camera purchases I have made.
The camera is an extremely good value, especially when you consider what it would cost to get an AVCHD camcorder and a waterproof housing (and the larger size). |
An underwater camera that's not three years behind regular cameras
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| Review Date: December 22, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Tuukka Toivonen, San Marcos, TX United States |
I bought this to upgrade from a Pentax Optio W30 that I carried everywhere for a couple of years, including about a hundred dips in the river. The Pentax was very reliable and still works perfectly well, but this camera is the only one I'm carrying now.
What's good about the Panasonic Lumix TS1 as compared to the Pentax Optio W30:
+ 28mm equivalent wide angle. I found I was shooting 95% of my pictures at the widest end of the Optio (about 35mm) and still often wishing for a wider angle. The TS1 finally delivers a wide angle.
+ Much better image quality than the Pentax. ISO400 is actually usable now, and I can leave auto ISO on!
+ Optical image stabilizer. Every modern camera has this.
+ 720p HD video. The Pentax only does 640x480 MJPEG that turns into a muddled mess with sensor noise and JPEG artifact. 720p from the TS1 looks great.
+ Quiet autofocus and zoom. The motor can barely be heard in videos if there's no other sound. Underwater, these sounds are magnified, and you can even hear the image stabilizer working in a quiet spot, but when do you need the sound in an underwater video?
+ Quick bootup, fast focus.
+ Zoom review option. This is great--it shows you a zoomed-in view after each photo so you can see if it's actually in focus.
+ Separate photo trigger/movie record buttons.
+ Good exposure and color balance control. I can leave everything on auto, with iExposure enabled to help with high dynamic range scenes, and images almost always come out fine.
What's not so great:
- Lens not very fast, with a maximum aperture of f/3.3 at the wide end that falls off quickly to f/5.9 at the tele end.
- Image quality okay, but not great. 12MP is excessive for such a tiny sensor; the lens can't resolve detail at that level anyway--with a 6MP sensor of the same size, this camera could take awesome photos.
- No pan focus mode. I liked that option for underwater shots on my Pentax. This can be sort of worked around by using autofocus lock, but it's not quite the same thing.
- No manual focus at all!
- Macro mode has trouble focusing on close-up objects and seems to prefer the background, even with spot focus enabled. With lack of manual focus, this can be a problem.
- No manual aperture/exposure time setting or raw image recording. I don't believe there's an underwater camera currently made that has these.
- Minimum macro range not as good as the Pentax.
- Have to hold power button down for one second for camera to power up, needlessly doubling bootup time.
- No manual "turn display on/off" function. This is a shame, since the display powerup is very fast. Automatic power saving choices are limited.
- Holding down buttons to scroll a picture has the usual 1-second delay before the key starts repeating that's been in digital devices since forever. It's almost 2010 now and we're all used to pressing keys, can we maybe get this down to a quarter-second like on our computer keyboards?
- There's a bug or incompatibility that causes HD video recorded by this camera to be played at double speed by some software. In Windows, at least Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC) plays the videos perfectly.
The camera also has tons of "scene modes" which I haven't gotten around to playing with. All in all, it feels like a modern point-and-shoot that performs adequately on land as well as under water. And takes awesome HD video without focus/zoom noise. |
Take the plunge, it's well worth it!! (no pun intended)
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| Review Date: September 22, 2009 |
| Reviewer: L.S., Phoenix, Arizona |
First off, I am an electronics fanatic and normally scour the internet for reviews/research on products before making a purchase. Never though have I left a review myself, but this time I feel I must due to the great quality of this camera. I am even more compelled to submit a review, since my last camera was the Sony DSC-T500 which can't come close to the Lumix DMC-TS1 on what I consider is one of the most important aspects of a digital camera.
First off, the camera is very well built and classy looking. There is no reason to assume it is a tough/waterproof camera at a glance. It would look just as at home in the water as well as out on the town. The photos themselves look wonderful and unless you pixel peek and want to make poster size prints, this camera will do just fine.
Some of the complaints I have read in other reviews include, no lens cover, only 10ft waterpoof, and 15 minutes max record for video. First off, no automatic closing lens cover is a good thing in my opinion. Normally when you power down, the lens cover closes. Well consider being at the beach with your new waterproof camera and having a few grains of sand get dragged along between the lens and the lens cover as it closes over them. I'd much rather deal with cleaning fingerprints than a scratched lens. Now some will argue that the uncovered lens will get scratched anyways. Well, keep it in a camera case when not in use, and you should be just fine.
As far as the 10ft waterproofing goes, this is plenty deep enough for general swimming, snorkeling, and sudden downpours. If you plan on using it for scuba diving, there now is an optional deep water case that Panasonic makes for this model that will allow you to go down 140 feet. While some of the other waterproofs go down 30 feet, they do not have this option let alone any good HD video recording. Therefore in actuality they are more limited in use than the Panasonic.
15 minutes max video record is for European models only due to some E.U. law that would reclassify it as a camcorder which in turn would change the import tax rate on it. Atleast this is what I have read. I have the U.S. version, and there is no limit as to how long you can record a AVCHD video clip unless obviously you run out of memory. By the way, the video looks great on my Panasonic Plasma tv through both the HDMI connection and the SD card reader on my bluray player which does recognize AVCHD video.
Now one of the most important aspects of a camera besides photo quality is battery life. Obviously without batteries, even the very best digital cameras are nothing more than a paperweight. As a comparison, my Sony DSC-T500 with its actally very nice 3.5" touch screen is a battery hog. After fully charging a battery, I would get an average 30-50 photos along with appox. 10-15 minutes max of AVCHD video before the battery was drained. Those large touchscreens are terrible for batteries and in my opinion, harder to navigate through than standard buttons. Now in comparison, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1 was MUCH MUCH better. I started with a full battery and was able to get on only 1 charge -- 75 photos with flash, 75 photos without flash, full zoom cycle 100 times and 90 minutes of AVCHD video set at the highest settings. I was using a Transcend 16gb sdhc card. This alone makes this camera 100% better than the Sony. Not to mention the photo quality is better, it uses cheaper priced easier to find sdhc cards and has the HDMI and A/V ports built into the camera instead of having to use a docking station for these features.
It really is a great camera for everyday use as well as slightly more extreme situations. While not as small as some of the other Panasonic cameras, it is still very pocketable. With the waterproof and shockproof case, AVCHD video function, which by the way is super easy to use with its own dedicated record button, EXCELLANT battery life, great photos and usefull accessories (i.e. deep water case), it will now be the only point and shoot camera I will use.
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