Waterproof camera group test on dpreview.com and the new Olympus Pen camera

Don't be mislead by the picture: none of the waterproof cameras floats. Dropping the camera in the water means losing your camera...

DPreview.com has just posted a group test on the current waterproof Digit Camera's. It's one of the rare serious and thorough tests. The conclusions of DPreview: performance of most waterproof digital camera's is poor compared to standard compact cameras. The Canon and Pentax cameras offer the best image quality within the group. The Canon is also the most responsive camera, leaving the rest far behind. Both Olympus cameras in the test perform disappointingly. The conclusions of DPreview match widely with my personal experiences.

And now a good word for Olympus (the maker of the legendary OM-1...): Not a waterproof, but a very interesting camera for travelling is the new Olympus Pen. It's a retro design inspired by the PEN half-frame 35 mm film cameras of the sixties and seventies. Forget history, the new concept is just perfect for light-weight-travelling: a compact-sized camera with exchangeable lenses, a (almost) DSLR-like picture quality and a video mode in HD-quality. Without the mechanical mirror concept of a DSLR the micro-four-thirds concept also promises to be less fragile. It has taken a (too) long time before anyone decided to make a digital camera with such a concept. If I had not recently invested in a complete new dslr system...


Comment of the makers to this remarkable video:
This is the PEN Story in stop motion. We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production! Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us. We hope you enjoy :-)

Free download of the music at http://olympus.eu/penstory/

Some of the comments we have read here suggest that we should mention the creator of "A wolf loves pork", Mr Takeuchi Taijin.
While we were looking for a way to realise a story describing "a journey through time" based on printed images, we were inspired by Mr Taijin's brilliant work. For this reason we intentionally quoted his work in our little movie while showing full respect to his original idea. We didnt mention his name because we did not want to do so without his prior agreement.
However after considering some of the comments posted here we have decided to add credits to him and his work, which we obviously absolutely love.