Camcordes that swim with the fishes

When you enter your golden years and sit back to enjoy the home videos of your youth, you might realize that your life's record is missing two huge genres. First, your home movies probably show only the happy and momentous times; nobody films the sad and lonely times.

And second, there's nothing underwater.

There won't be scenes in water parks, swimming pools, or the surf, either, and nothing in the rain. After all, very few watery scenes are so important that it's worth risking the life of your $300 camcorder to capture them.

Some clever engineers at Sanyo, Olympus and Pentax aim to get you wet. All three companies have introduced waterproof camera/camcorders, for your summertime splashing pleasure. These companies are not using cop-out words like "water resistant," "weatherproof" or "tough enough to withstand wiping with a damp cloth." These are really waterproof. They're water- and pressure-proof enough to spend a long time many feet below the surface of the water.

None of these machines have lens covers, which is a little alarming at first. (The glass itself is tough enough not to need one.) And none have optical eyepiece viewfinders; you have to frame your scene using the screen. All three machines should be looped to your wrist in the water, because they sink. And all are capable of taking both stills and video, although each specializes in one or the other.

For example, Sanyo's just-released Xacti E1

($490) is primarily a camcorder--the world's first waterproof one if you don't count the bulky, expensive housings you can buy for regular camcorders. It's one of those tiny vertical pistol-grip camcorders that records onto SD memory cards instead of tape. (No card is included with the camera. A 4-gigabyte card, about $35, holds nearly three hours of best-quality video.)

Somebody in Sanyo's design department should be taken out for sushi, because this is one great-looking camera. The body is sculptured and sporty and dressed in colorful metallic paint, with chrome and black accents.

The controls are simple enough: one button near your thumb snaps a photo, and the other starts or stops recording video. But the zoom/four-way navigation controls are the size of a Tic Tac, and fussy in the extreme; you practically need to run your fingernails through a pencil sharpener before you can try to twiddle it.

And the video quality, well, if a camera phone is 1 on the quality scale and a digital tape camcorder is 10, the Sanyo's quality is about a 7.

[Via NY Times]