Product Tour
Panasonic's DMC-TS1 is obviously designed for strength, with substantial plating for protection and dust protection. The overall beveled aesthetic makes it look chunky, but not in a bad way. The buttons are all large and robust, which is fantastic, as they're all easy to identify by feel, if a little stiff at times. The camera will be available silver, green, or orange (seen here).
Front
The front of the camera is relatively barren. The flash is near the center, at the top, and to its right is a small LED for additional illumination. The permanently retracted lens is tucked away in the upper right corner. Interestingly, there is no sliding cover for the lens, rather it's protected by a layer of transparent plastic, which hopefully won't get scratched.
Back
The top right of the back has the small mode dial tucked in the corner. Beneath that is the four-way pad, which is raised noticeably more than most others we've seen. Above and below this d-pad are two buttons in each direction. The top right is the small round control that starts videos recording.The vast majority of this side of the camera is taken up by the 2.7-inch, 230,000 pixel LCD.
Sides
The left side is functionally entirely blank, if not aesthetically.
The right side houses the ports, which are well protected, as well as a loop to hook on a lanyard.
Top
On the top of the camera are a number of important controls. The small round power button, a large and textured shutter button, and a slider for zoom control. This zoom slider is placed unusually in its proximity to the shutter, and takes a little getting used to. The speaker can be seen beneath the smattering of holes to the left of the power button.
Bottom
Tucked away beneath the camera are the usual culprits: a rather solid feeling tripod mount, and the very tough portal to the memory card and battery.
Hardware
LCD
The LCD screen is 2.7 inches diagonally, 230,000 pixels, very bright, and seems unaffected by solarization at even the most extreme of angles. It can be set to seven levels of brightness, as well as auto or extra-bright mode. Hitting the Display button alters the amount of information on the screen, with nothing, guidelines, or shooting information.
Flash
The flash is small, bright, and positioned far enough from errant fingers to avoid being blocked easily. It can be set to auto, red-eye reduction, on, slow sync or off. In intelligent auto shooting mode, that's limited to auto or off.
Lens
As you'll find with many of these cameras designed to resist the crush of the elements, the lens is permanently recessed, and set away in the top right corner of the camera's front. In this case, there's not even a sliding cover over the lens, but rather a sheet of clear (and hopefully scratch-resistant) plastic. It has a wide angle lens with 4.6x optical zoom (28 - 128mm 35mm equivalent). The zoom can be extended further at lower resolutions to a maximum of 9.0x at three megapixels.
Jacks, Ports & Plugs
The DSC-TS1's ports are suitably well protected given the overall robustness of the camera. It uses a standard HDMI output, and a proprietary USB input.
Battery
The camera has a proprietary Lithium Ion battery that's rated to 330 pictures.
Memory
The TS1 can make use of SD, SDHC and MMC cards, which are the standard for point-and-shoot cameras.
Shock and Waterproof
The DMC-TS1 is officially waterproof to 10 feet, shockproof for drops of up to five feet, as well as dust proof. Unfortunately, we didn't have the opportunity to submerge it in a great body of water to test this, but it performed relatively well in a sink.
Design & Layout
Design & Appearance
The TS1 is certainly a chunky camera. While not overly large, its design is definitely cubist, and it's covered with beveled edges. The buttons are all large, and project more than normal, which makes them tougher and a bit easier to use if you're gloved. The layout of the camera is nothing to write home about, and is like most of the other point-and-shoots on the market.
Size & Handling
The Panasonic is a good size to hold, and all the buttons are large and clearly defined, so you won't be likely to press the wrong one. The placement of the zoom slider in front of the shutter control felt a little odd, but is something that would be easy to get used to. With the lack of a dedicated grip, one hopes the camera doesn't get too slippery when wet, as you'd hate to lose it in the briny depth of the ocean.
Menu
The menus are exceedingly bright, due in part to their black icons and text on a white background. If you find the font a little hard on the eyes, there's an option to bump up the size, a factor often forgotten by manufacturers. The menus are laid out logically in various tabs, but each tab can involve scrolling through as many as five pages of options. For the options that are frequently altered, there's a quick menu, where you can change burst mode, focus mode, white balance, ISO, and the like.
Ease of Use
The familiarity of design of the TS1 makes it quite easy to use. If you've encountered many point-and-shoot cameras, you shouldn't have much trouble with this one. There's also an intelligent auto mode, which removes the majority of controls for those who don't want to be bothered with such things.
Modes
Auto Mode
In the lack of a manual mode, the TS1 is only automatic, but to varying degrees. Normal Picture mode gives you access to all the controls, intelligent auto takes them all away again, and the plethora of scene modes are generally somewhere in-between.
Movie Mode
The TS1 is unlike most cameras, which have a movie mode on the mode dial, as it has a red button which starts movie recording at any point. The DMC-TS1 also has a LED on the front of the camera that's used as a source of illumination while filming. The camera can record motion JPEG at VGA and QVGA resolution, or AVCHD Lite, which is 720p resolution. You are allowed a significant amount of control in movie mode, including white balance, autofocus mode, color mode, and even a tool to minimize wind noise in the microphone.
Drive/Burst Mode
At highest resolution, the TS1 can take 2.3 frames per second for a maximum of five images, which can be bumped up to 10 frames per second at three megapixels.
Playback Mode
In playback you can zoom in up to 16x, or out to 30 thumbnails. For editing controls, you can resize, add text, trim, rotate or mark as a favorite. Images can be organized either by order taken, by mode (still, motion JPEG or AVCHD lite), or by category (portraits, landscape, macro etc).
Custom Image Presets
The color mode can be set to standard, natural, vivid, black and white, sepia, cool or warm. The substantial number of scene modes are: clipboard (low resolution); beach, snow, sports, portrait, soft skin, transform (stretches or squashes the photo), self portrait, scenery, panorama assist, night portrait, night scenery, food, party, candle light, baby 1, baby 2, pet, sunset, high sensitivity, hi-speed burst, flash burst, starry sky, fireworks, aerial photo (for plane windows), pin hole, film grain, and underwater.
Controls
Manual Controls
While there is no true manual mode, you can still alter most of the standard settings, though strangely not metering. In general, there are enough controls here for those who want to fiddle with how their camera operates.
Focus
The focus can be set to face recognition, tracking, normal, continuous and quick. The face recognition system can apparently learn particular faces, but this isn't a feature we've seen work properly in other cameras.
ISO
The ISO runs from 80 to 1600, with a high sensitivity equivalent of up to 6400. It can also be limited to a max of ISO 400, 800 or 1600.
White Balance
White balance can be put on auto, daylight, cloudy, shade, halogen or manual.
Metering
The camera is permanently set on 'intelligent multiple' metering which meters from the entire picture. Exposure compensation runs ±2EV in 1/3 steps.
Shutter Speed
While you have no direct control over shutter speed, you can set the minimum from 1/125 to 1 second. The stated range of shutter speeds is 8-1/1300 seconds, with up to 60 seconds in starry sky mode. The maximum speed of 1/1300 seconds isn't particularly fast, but not too sluggish.
Aperture
The aperture runs from f/3.3 to f/11 at the wide end and f/5.9 to f/18 at the tele. This is a little on the slow side, but not terrible. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to directly control the aperture, which is always a sad limiting factor.
Image Stabilization
The DSC-TS1 has an optical image stabilizer, which can be set to two different levels.
Picture Quality & Size Options
This camera has a rather stunning number of image sizes and ratios, all of which can be set to two levels of quality.
4:3 aspect ratio: 4000x3000 (12M), 3264 x 2448 (8M), 2560 x 1920 (5M), 2048 x 1536 (3M), 1600 x 1200 (2M), 640 x 480 (0.3M)
3:2 aspect ratio: 4000 x 2672(10.5M), 3264 x 2176 (7M), 2560 x 1712 (4.5M), 2048 x 1360 (2.5M)
16:9 aspect ratio: 4000 x 2248(9M), 3264 x 1840 (6M), 2560 x 1440 (3.5M), 1920 x 1080 (2M)
Conclusion
Meet the tester
Tim Barribeau is a valued contributor to the Reviewed.com family of sites.
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