I love to spend time on the water and over the years I've tried quite frequently tried to take pictures out on the water. To date most of these efforts have been pretty pitiful, from disposable water cameras to various small SLR cameras (in the days of film) with water housings. I love to windsurf for the most part so a lot of the photo taking is related that particular sport and most of the cameras had the fatal flaw of delayed shutters and shutter speeds that were too slow to actually capture the action. 

A couple of months ago somebody showed up at the beach with a  Digital Hero Camera. This camera is a tiny little thing and it costs about $140. It comes a with a water housing and a wrist strap and you can strap the whole thing around your wrist and take it with you on the water. I saw that and the next day went out and got one for myself to try out.

The wrist strap probably works for a few sports, but for windsurfing the fit's not tight enough and the camera pops off its bottom constraining strap because of all the jarring. However, the whole assembly is small enough that you can just strap the whole thing to yourself any way you see fit. I strapped it to my harness and although it flaps around a bit because the strap can't be made tighter than a wrist width, it's so small that it doesn't get in the way.

The camera shoots pictures at 3 mega pixels and while it's not perfect it actually works well for a camera so small for use in the water. I took out this camera with a friend for the last 3 sailing sessions and we got some pretty cool pictures. Here are a couple examples (these are cropped and reduced in size but you can get a good idea):

That's pretty impressive for a camera this small and certainly the best experience I've had with any camera I've played with that I can take in the water with me. And not worry about beating up when I take it out sailing with me. <s> The cool thing about this thing is that it's small enough that you can just take it with you without getting in the way.

The camera also does video at 640x480 and the quality of the video is quite decent.

Storage is on an SD card which is not included. I bought a CostCo 2 gig SD card for 40 bucks and that can hold 52 minutes of video or more pictures that I can shoot in one session <s>.

The camera is not without its problems though: Pictures can be finiky. Shoot too close and you get a good deal of fish eye distortion. The camera actually seems to work best when the subject matter is not real close - more like 30 feet+ away. Close shots do work (like the third one), but it's really important to get the main subject centered and some generic content on the edges where any warping won't show.

When shooting into the light there's a bunch of image distortion with some unwanted glitter and glare effects (see 4th pic) in many situations. Still - although there are a fair amount of bad pictures in each set we took, there were many good ones as well. Remembering back from the days of throw away film cameras we were always glad to get 1 or 2 good pictures out of the batch. This camera does a lot better than that and the quality is actually better.

The controls are pretty cryptic and there are only two buttons: One controls on/off and options and the other is the shutter and selector. The camera has a bunch of different picture modes and bunch of options, but you better read the manual to figure out what's what. There's no preview and no easy way to delete individual pictures, so you basically take pictures and then later review them from the SD card. There's also a USB cable with an oddball mini-USB connector but my Vista machine didn't recognize it. But it's no big deal to just read the SD card.

The other issue is battery life. The camera uses two AAA batteries and it chews through them very quickly. I put two brand new AAA batteries into the camera yesterday and we took it out yesterday and today for two short photo sessions and the batteries died during the second session. I'd say total time the camera was on was maybe half an hour to 45 minutes total. I talked to tech support a while back and they said the batteries are supposed to last for about 3 hours of photo shooting but I didn't see that. They offered to replace the camera when I originally contacted them - I was very surprised to have their tech support be so helpful and I may still take them up on their offer.

All in all though I'm pretty pleased with the results from this camera just from the water perspective. The camera is so very small it will be handy for other things as well. Any situation where you'd want to film an ongoing operation - filming bike ride downhill maybe, or taking it snorkeling (or diving) will be on my list soon... but for anything in the water, this thing is great!

As I said it's not perfect, but if you're in the water and you want to take pictures without dragging a big ass camera out with you this thing is totally worth it...