Canon PowerShot D10 review

The D10’s soap-shaped blue and silver body is obviously designed for an aquatic life.

As such, you’re less likely to attract bemused looks when you wander into the sea with it, but it may look a bit out of place on dry land. Alternative front plates are available in orange, grey and a delightfully over-the-top camouflage and cost around £37 for the set (product code FC-DC1). There’s also an optional carabiner strap (STP-DC2, around £38) for attaching the camera to your climbing equipment, but it’s not intended for underwater use.

The camera itself is waterproof down to 10m, making it suitable for scuba diving as well as snorkelling. It’s shockproof, too, withstanding falls from 1.2 metres, but it doesn’t conform to any official drop-test standards. Still, the rounded metal body seems extremely robust. As with all the waterproof cameras, the D10 protects its lens behind a glass window, but this window protrudes out of the camera rather than being recessed. The 49mm depth from lens to screen makes it the chunkiest camera here.

The 3x zoom range is disappointing, but this, along with the relatively bulky lens design, contributes to the superb sharpness this lens is capable of. In bright conditions, the D10’s images were more detailed than those of any other camera here. The 12-megapixel resolution means there’s ample opportunity to crop photos and still retain plenty of detail. Colours were excellent, too, with particularly pleasing skin tones when using the flash.

Indoor shots without the flash were much less impressive, though, with a massive drop in detail. Every camera we tested this month struggled in low light, and the D10 was above average, but Panasonic’s and Ricoh’s models fared better. Videos were crisp and smooth, with high-quality audio, but their 640×480 resolution couldn’t match the Panasonic DMC-FT1’s 1,280×720 HD video.

This is a likeable, high-quality camera, but the DMC-FT1 has more going for it.