I'm not actually 'on a holiday' but I am away from home and at the beach! One of the things I wanted to do when I was up here was to take a couple of cameras back into the water and see how they performed.
HOlding the Olympus TG2 half in and half out of a still pond results in this craziness...
Now, the cameras I've chosen are "point and shoot" cameras and they don't shoot RAW and they don't allow for full manual control, though they do have some operations you can fiddle with.. Aperture, etc.. They have a feature set that includes 'scene modes for underwater' etc. The two cameras I'm using are the Olympus TG2 and the Sony TX30.
I reviewed an earlier Olympus Tough 8000 when it was released back in 2009 [here] and, as was pretty typical, only had the thing for a couple of weeks - for a camera that's billed as tough, that's not really enough time to see how it handles the rigours of regular 'tough' life - you know, taking it in water and stuff... You can see by the comments that people who have purchased that camera are not super happy with it.
The original Olympus Tough 8000 was where the fun started...
Come forward five years and there have been a lot of advancements in tech as well as the housings, seals and performance of 'tough' cameras as is evident in the TG2 and the TX30, too.
Anyways, over the next two weeks (I'm already a week in) I'll be taking the two cameras on more underwater adventures (as long as the water clears a little, it's been VERY murky with recent rains!)
Some little fishies in the murkiness...
...and will report back with my findings!
I've had one instance of condensation build up in the TG2, right in the middle of the lens, which meant I missed a couple of photographs of my little boy playing in the sand, I've not experienced that with the Sony yet.
Condensation from a rapid change in temp, let the camera sit for a few minutes...
One thing I do find amusing is when, while snorkelling and diving down to photograph some fish or some such thing, is looking at the back of the screen and seeing the name of a local landmark scrolling across the top - Yay for GPS, eh...
More later... Sime