New waterproof camera

I have been looking for a replacement for my old Pentax Optio. I loved mine but haven’t heard great things about some of the later models. I love the pix and particularly the video quality of my Panasonic LX3. If this has the same video quality of the LX3 in a waterproof form factor will have to pickup one for use as my take everywhere, no really everywhere camera. The LX3 is great but can be a bit bulky and I wouldn’t want to take it to the beach. I took it skiing last week and got some great video but I was a little nervous I would break it. It made it home just fine but I wouldn’t want to take it to many more times and expect it to work. I like the idea of using a camera like this as a video camera.

Coming in April Panasonic will be releasing the Lumix DMC-TS1D. It features a LEICA lens with 4.6x optical zoom (28mm-129mm). The camera body is waterproof to 3 meters. It can shoot in temperatures as low as 14 degrees Fahrenheit and it has passed drop tests at a height of about 4.92 ft.

The camera shoots in AVCHD format – lets you shoot HD motion images for a longer time
The TS1 records HD motion images at a smooth 60 frames per second with 1280 x 720-pixel resolution. It uses the AVCHD (MPEG-4/H.264) format, which stores less data than other formats and thus lets you shoot more minutes of HD motion images before running out of memory.
Here are some pix. Head over to Imaging Insider or Panasonic for more details.

Here is the LX3 video from my ski trip for reference. Click here then hit the watch in HD to see a better version.

You can also click on the HQ on the right side of the video