Canon D10 Review
The Canon D10 is a little different towards the run of the mill digital camera. For a start it is waterproof with a depth of 10m. This considers it a good choice when you are searhing for a camera to use around the pool while you are on holiday. Next up it’s freezeproof to -10 degrees centigrade. Therefore it must also keep working in all but the most extreme cold conditions. Over this it’s protected against drops. Canon say the Powershot D10 can deal with drops around 1.2m. So when you have a small child some protection against over zealous use or accidental drops is constructed in. The camera can also be dustproof.
All of these features go together to create this camera one of the most robust digital cameras for the market. Another area where it’s different is the way it looks. It isn’t easy to describe the Canon D10. It is nearly as if Canon has started off with a typically rectangular shape and then pumped air into it to plump it up. It is two tone with one half silver and the other bright blue. The lens unit protrudes from the camera. One concern I have is that the lens itself doesn’t retreat into your body when the camera is turned off and I couldn’t see a lens cover in the box. The camera is almost 50mm wide, so it will not fit into a pocket very easily.
I discovered the layout of the buttons on the back of the camera to be a bit fiddly. Perhaps I am not useful to the layout and this would improve once I have got to know the camera more. Even so I found accessing the zoom controls harder than is generally the case.
Hiding inside the body unit is a fairly typical point and shoot digital camera. As ever Canon includes a couple of extra features for example manual focusing and many extra flash options. Also built in are more standard features for example image stabilisation plus a 2.5 inch LCD screen. There is a 12 megapixel sensor plus a 3x optical zoom lens. As is becoming more common is the ability to reduce the number of megapixels you are shooting at in return for increasing the amount of zoom available.
The Canon D10 does not possess a High Definition movie mode, but is capable of shooting Standard Definition TV quality movies. Sound could be recorded with the movie. Optical zoom can be applied till you start shooting your movie clip. Digital zoom can be applied while shooting is in progress, but this is probably going to decrease the standard of the movie footage.
Other features that are now considered the norm are available. These include face detection for sharp and properly exposed portraits, plus red eye correction to clean up any red eye introduced into portrait shots taken using flash.
Picture quality is good. The camera performed well in the variability of tests I put it through. Considering the results the standard falls slightly short of that offered by the perfect Canon digital cameras, but it should still be good enough to knock out lots of fun snapshots.
The Canon D10 is the first waterproof digital camera from Canon. Competition is provided through the Olympus MJU Tough 8000. I discovered little to choose between the two cameras with both of them doing the job they set out to do.
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