Olympus waterproof compact cameras

Diving without a camera feels like sort of cheating. so easy to swim, no heavy camera rig with all the strobes lenses arms etc making you use up lots more air. it's just too easy.

So sometimes one might want to dive "without a camera". Which of course means diving with a smaller camera rig-- diving with no camera at all (really no camera) is impossible, lets face it. It makes no sense whatsoever.

I've been looking at the olympus waterproof cameras. Compact thin cameras, probably good to use on land, when traveling, a small camera that is easy to keep in a pocket. Also, when using them in a housing during diving, a leak is probably not a big problem since the camera itself is waterproof.

The images on this post are stolen from the olympus australia webpages (and link to them). There are several models, in, lets say, two categories: the ones waterproof to 3m and the ones waterproof to 10m. the newest model is the 1030SW (Shockproof-Waterproof).

see the olympus australia website for more info and more pictures or dpreview's page.

Olympus 1030SW, 10mpixels, wide 28-102mm equiv lens, 1/2.33" Type CCD, waterproof to 10m, shockproof for drops from up to 2m, crushproof for up to 100kg, freezeproof down to -10C. According to the olympus australia webpages, the camera has a 1fps for flash sequence shooting, or 6.9fps flash sequence shooting at 3MP.

Bad things about it: no aperture/shutter priority, no manual controls, no image stabilization. Only up to 10sec high quality (VGA) video recording. And also those stupid useless xD cards. But fortunately there seems to be a micro-SD to xD adapter.

Other models include 850SW and previous models 770 790, 795 etc.

Olympus makes proper underwater (40m) housings for the SW series. the 1030SW goes with the PT-043 housing, waterproof to 40m, with a threaded lens fitting (52mm) that can take wide angle, fisheye and closeup wet lenses, as well as red/color correction filters. A step-up ring (52 to 67mm) is available (by olympus and others).
The 1030SW is listed for 400USD, and the housing around 220USD (for the housing see for example from videodirect.com). Previous models are now much cheaper but the housings are about the same price as far as i can see. 790SW or 770SW are about 250USD.

Reading the reviews for SW series olympus cameras from dpreview and other websites it seems that the actual image performance of the camera is not that great, however the features and the underwater-friendly attitude of olympus make these cameras very attractive.

The newest model 1030SW is the best choice because of its wide 28mm equiv lens. The biggest problem is the lack of aperture/shutter priority and manual modes.