The Year of the Ox certainly brought me early prosperity with the arrival of a brand new Panasonic Lumix DMC TZ15 compact camera and its underwater housing, on loan basis to yours truly, courtesy of Panasonic Malaysia Sdn Bhd.


The TZ15 came with a Leica DC Vario-Elmarit lens with a focal length of 28mm on the wide-angle side which, for my underwater photography purposes, is what I'm quite excited to explore. The 3" 460k-pixel LCD will help me a lot underwater, that I'm pretty sure already.


As expected from a compact camera in this class, the TZ15 does not offer manual, aperture- or speed-priority shooting modes. Therefore, I will be trying either the "Underwater" scene mode or the "Normal picture" mode for my underwater shoots. There are three features of this camera which I immediately liked after a few minutes of going through the controls and manuals:




   1. It's very easy to change the exposure compensation (EV) value using the directional buttons on the right side of the LCD


   2. Important setting (to me at least) like white balance and metering mode can easily be accessed through the "quick menu" (Q-menu button)


   3. Setting up a custom white balance is surprisingly easy.


The underwater casing looks cool too. I like the design of the flash diffuser (top-left side of the round lens port) which incorporated a "trench" for you to pass through an optical cable from an external strobe such as those from INON to the back of the diffuser. The casing also has a built-in slot to nicely hold an INON optical sensor in place. The casing was designed with INON strobe in mind I believe.


I had the camera with me last weekend at the Cheras pool during the Reef Check training session and will post up the pictures here later.
