Both Canon and Panasonic has announced their first shock and water-proof compact toughcams during the beginning this year. If you are thinking of getting a waterproof toughcam, 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 want a camera that can perform around 10 meters underwater, then Canon D10 would be your best shot. The submarine shaped D10 with its porthole-like screws and bulbous shell shows that this cam is purely made for underwater. But on ground, users will face difficulties to fit the cam into their pocket because of its bulky shape. D10 includes easy-to-press buttons and a large LCD screen where icons are big and nice, can be spotted easily through a snorkeling mask. Additionally, it contains bigger screw-mouths on every corner for mounting the camera in various underwater grips.

On the other hand, Panasonic TS1 is protected up to 3 meters only 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 big difference is that the 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 outstanding HD video mode. TS1 is currently experiencing 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 featuring 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.

In case 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 getting 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 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 D10.

Canon D10 available in these stores :
- Amazon ($311.34)
- Buy.com ($319.99)
- NewEgg ($329.00)

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TC1 available in this store :
- Amazon ($399.98)

(Image Credit : Gizmodo)