Canon S90 vs Sealife DC1000 Snorkeling Camera
by Maureen
I'm looking for a snorkeling camera and was wondering if you knew anything about the Sealife DC1000 and how that compares with the Canon S90 setup in your list of recommendations. Galen's Reply Maureen, good question. The Sealife DC1000 has a few good things going for it. Price first, you can pick up the camera with housing for just under $500 at one of the good retailers listed at the bottom of this post. That is about a hundred bucks less than the S90 with the Canon housing. And by all accounts the housing on the Sealife DC1000 is very nice to use. Read this divers review of the Sealife DC1000. The other thing the DC1000 has going for it is that it has accessories available that plug right into the housing, including a wide angle wet lens and flashes. For a snorkeler I don't value those items much. But here is why I don't recommend it over the S90 with the Canon housing for a snorkeler. The Sealife DC1000 camera is actually a re-branded Minox DC 1030 camera. This is a German camera maker, and that camera itself goes for about 1/2 the price of the Canon S90. So you are paying a lot for the housing. And the Minox just does not have the image quality of the Canon. Plus it has no manual controls, while the Canon has full manual controls. The lens is slower. And while it does have a much longer zoom range, that is really of no value underwater. Plus it only starts at about 37mm (35mm equivalent) on the wide end, but the Canon starts at 28mm, which is much more useful underwater. And while it does appear that Sealife has modified the Minox camera firmware to include some different white balance settings (their snorkel setting), it is no where near as easy to set a manual white balance setting yourself as the Canon is. With the Canon S90 you can set a new color balance with one button push, which makes getting the right colors for different situations very easy, and will yield you much better pictures than using one fixed setting (on the Sealife). Finally, the Canon S90 is world class in low light high ISO performance. I am positive it beats the pants off the cheaper Minox camera in that realm. I would normally be able to prove that, but I can't find any real tests of the Minox camera (a little odd by itself). Good ISO performance is a real advantage if you are not using a big flash. You will be able to stop the motion of fish better, have less blurry pictures because of hand movement, and have less "grainy" and noisy pictures. So all and all, for the extra hundred dollars you spend on the Canon, you get a much more capable camera, with professional features, that will take better pictures. But the downside of the Canon housing is that it will not be easy to add accessories lenses (not something I value snorkeling anyways, but you may). Sealife makes some pretty good setups. But generally they take fairly inexpensive lower quality brand cameras and put them in fancy housings. I hope this helps with your decision.
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