I have been a Canon camera user for many years, starting with SLR and most recently using a Eos 300D. During the last two years my interests have changed and I am now more active especially snorkeling, as I live on a tropical island. 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 soon found the Canon PowerShot D10.
I’m very impressed with the picture quality on this camera. The 12 megapixel sensor, coupled with a dozen shooting modes, produces an excellent image. 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 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 that I really like is a grid overlay on the screen to assist with shot composition and the “Rule of Thirds.” The optical zoom works great but by the time you get to 12x with the digital zoom, the image is a little grainy, but that’s to be expected and I don’t use this much zoom anyway.
Equally you can take macro photographs really close to your subject. I’ve had trouble focusing my EOS 500D in low light, but Canon seems to have definitely 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.
The face recognition and blink detection both 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 your requirement. Images appear very crisp, which I rightly or wrongly attribute to the image stabilization features, which can also be turned on or off.
I have now been snorkeling with the PowerShot D10 several times with no problems. At a guess I would say that I have only been to a depth of ten or twelve feet, far short of the thirty three feet that Canon claim is the depth that it is waterproof to. I could ask my scuba diving friend to take it deeper but then he might go too deep and I will be out of pocket unnecessarily. When snorkeling there is no chance of dropping the camera as I purchased the accessory pack with the carabiner strap for clipping it to my belt. The camera comes with a wrist strap.
The camera doesn’t allow you to shoot in RAW. I don’t shoot in RAW anyway and don’t know too much about it, so that doesn’t worry me. The PowerShot D10 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.
I use Adobe Photoshop CS so I haven’t loaded the Canon software and can’t comment on it. 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. Having said that I am going on a sailing vacation soon so will give the in camera editing a go.
This Canon PowerShot D10 Review reveals a couple of drawbacks of the D10 in my opinion. The main one for me is that there is no lens cap, and I worry about the lens surface getting damaged but the glass shield is claimed to be scratchproof. For a rugged “adventure” camera this could be deemed a big ommision. The camera isn’t threaded so you’re not able to attach filters.
The microphone picks up every noise that your fingers make as you hold the camera, so it’s difficult to capture movies without some camera noise. The speaker is on the bottom of the camera which makes it difficult to hear when playing movies back on the camera. However movies sound fine when I put the memory chip into the computer and watch in Quicktime. Movies are produced in the .mov format, so you’ll have to do some conversion if you want to do anything with it in Windows Movie Maker or other editing suites. You can also choose between higher quality 640 x 480, or lower quality 320 x 240 for your movies.
The best thing about this camera? You can give it to your 6 year old to take underwater pics and not worry about it, how many other “real” cameras can you do that with?! Now I can spend the day at the beach, go snorkeling and take pictures of the fish, and my family, with no concerns. And the best thing is that this camera works just as well on land. It’s the perfect no nonsense go anywhere everyday camera. As I said before I am lucky and live on a tropical island where snorkeling is an everyday event but think rivers and water theme parks in the US.
