Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1

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.

The LCD is fairly average

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.

The flash is small, but well placed

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.

The lens is tucked away in the top right corner

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.

The ports are well protected

Battery

The camera has a proprietary Lithium Ion battery that's rated to 330 pictures.

The port for battery and memory card

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.

The camera handles water quite well