Some nice underwater features but color software needs improvement
For a trip to the Yucatan I purchased the SeaLife DC1000 with single flash unit as we anticipated diving and also a Canon D10 to allow more options while snorkeling. The DC1000 has some nice features (push-button controls are generally easy to use underwater) and comes at a reasonable price for a dive-capable camera for those of us that have limited chances to do photography with scuba. In general the camera worked well and took some nice pictures while diving at 50 feet using the flash which is essential under these conditions. As noted by the prior review however its performance for shallow-water snorkeling could have been substantially better. I initially had problems with the flash under these conditions which frequently overwhelmed the image. After regular adjustment of the power flash pictures worked better but this means that one-chance shots (e.g. fish) may be lost. There are other adjustment options for the flash (macro vs. long-distance settings) that I did not have a chance to try which may improve results but the amount of adjusting to get a good flash result is frustrating given that the flash is supposed to be integrated into the camera system. Because of the erratic flash results I was getting I also explored alternative non-flash modes. This revealed the biggest negative of the camera--the "special" underwater color bias settings seem to function by just adding varying levels of red to everything whether the objects are red or not. After it became obvious that the underwater settings were generating unacceptable results I started instead taking pictures underwater with the land setting which of course creates images that are more blue than natural due to long-wavelength light attenuation. After returning home I explored whether I could salvage some of the images using Photoshop. This helped to a limited extent for the shots taken in the underwater setting but the excess red could not be entirely eliminated. In contrast when color balance/contrast filtering was applied to shots taken with the standard land setting the resulting image colors were excellent and true to life. So in the end the special underwater adjustment features seem more of a sales gimmick that will send unsuspecting users astray rather than a strong selling point. In the future SeaLife should consider teaming up with Adobe to come up with a quality image filter algorithm. An option that I did not try was to manually set the white balance using the included white board (another thing to hold onto in the water...)--this might fix the problem. Other negatives to the camera were an annoying delayed response when trying to change zoom settings and a very slow focus/shutter response resulting in missed pictures. As I used the camera more it seemed to me that the photo was taken when I released the button rather than when I initially depressed it as one would expect in other cameras.
So how did it compare to the Canon D10 performance? Without the fancy underwater settings the Canon took expected blue-biased photos that when filtered through the contrast/color balance filters of Photoshop produced excellent vivid true to life shots. In general the image sharpness of the D10 was slightly better than the DS1000 as perhaps might be expected when using a product from a top-tier camera company. Bottom line: if you are just going to snorkel during the day go with the Canon D10 and save yourself a good chunk of money. If you are planning to dive or night snorkel then the DS1000 may be the way to go but expect to experiment/practice with the equipment before you get consistent results.More detail ...
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