Tg-860 - What A Great P&s!

[Hoomi]

It was time to replace my old Canon SD-1300IS, as the U/W case was missing one of the rubber pads inside for changing functions, the case has been discontinued, and the replacement pads were not readily available.

My wife picked up the Olympus TG-860 last year, after finally having enough frustration from her Sealife camera, and was impressed with it after a trip down to the Sea of Cortez. I decided to go with one as well, and found a factory refurbished on the Olympus webpage for a pretty good price.

We both invested in the PT-057 case for the camera before last week's trip to Cozumel. The TG-860 is good to 50' deep without any additional case, and my wife had used it that way at Himalaya Bay last year. With a lot of the dives in Cozumel being deeper than 50', though, we needed the external case.

I thought my little Canon was a nice P&S, but the Olympus has blown me away. The ease of setting for underwater modes and the quality of photos from a point and shoot is terrific. I also like that I don't have to change any mode switches for video. I just need to press the video button on the back, shoot the video I want, and afterwards the camera is still in the u/w mode and ready to shoot still photos.

Olympus did a great job on the TG-800 series cameras, and I expect I'm going to enjoy this one for a long time.

I'll see about getting a few of the photos uploaded to my Photobucket, and post them as examples.

 

[Skeptic14]

The tough series olympus cameras are pretty versatile, look forward to seeing some of the pictures.

 

[Hoomi]

Here's a few from the trip.

Flamingo Tongue snail. This is the only photo in this post that I did any editing on. The original photo was of the entire structure, and I went in with Lightroom, zoomed in on the snail and cropped, and did a minor amount of color balancing. The other three photos in this post are unedited.

We saw turtles all five days of diving. This is one of my favorite turtle shots from the week.

This shot was captured using only the built-in flash on the camera.

I think this was the smallest lionfish I have ever seen. His fin span wasn't much more than the size of our divemaster's hand. Once again, this show used only the built-in flash, and no other external lighting. Yes, I know lionfish are an invasive species in Cozumel as well, but I don't think we would have been allowed to do any harm to anything we found along the reef.