Good info! Thanks for sharing with us.

John

"warren montgomery" wrote in message
...
A couple of months ago I posted a request here and a couple of other groups
for any suggestions on an underwater digital for shallow water (snorkeling)
use by someone who only visits tropical locales once every 2-3 years. I
got no replies. Don't know what that means, but in case someone is
interested, after looking at a lot of options, I went with an Olympus model
waterproof to 10 meters, and just returned from a trip where I used it. In
short, it was a great choice for what I wanted and came with some
unexpected bonuses. The camera is very compact, about the size of a deck of
cards, but with a 2 gig memory card it will shoot over 1000 pictures or
1-1/2 hours of movies at the highest resolution. All of the controls will
work underwater and aren't too hard to work with your thumb and fingers.
It does a decent job of focusing underwater as well. It seems to have
plenty of battery life to go a couple of hours of shooting under the
conditions I was using it at least. (It will also draw some strange looks
from others who see you dive in the water looking like you forgot you still
had your point and shoot camera on you and have just ruined it.) The
ability to have that many shots allowed me to be extravagent and as a
result get a few good keepers, as opposed to struggling to get all perfect
shots with a film camera with 27 or 37 exposures. Another unexpected bonus
was the movie capability, which added a new dimension (swimming fish and
sea turtles among other things). It has a variety of pre-set modes for
shooting underwater, but the general program mode seems to work as well as
any in getting decent shots. I actually learned a lot more about shooting
underwater using this camera than my film cameras simply because I could
get immediate feedback, and learn, for example, that flash was really not a
benefit except in very clear water conditions (with anything in the water
the flash will light it and give the shot a cloudy cast). Probably my only
disappointment was not being able to see better in the LCD screen. I had
thought using the screen would be a benefit over a film camera with an
optical viewfinder, since it's almost impossible to see well in a view
finder wearing a diving mask. The screen provides more visibility, but
it's hard to see in direct sun, and I found it hard to pick out subjects
that had low color contrast with the background. I suspect that some colors
simply don't display as brightly as they should, making it hard to keep a
small fish in the frame of the shot. Still though this is a dramatic leap
forward over what I got from film, where I never knew exactly what was
going to be on the film until it was developed (and I no longer had the
opportunity to try a different shot).


--
Warren Montgomery )
http://home.att.net/~wamontgomery