The water was crystal clear in the small lagoon I had come across on my early morning walk along the lonely undulating beach outside the Taj Bentota in Bentota, Sri Lanka.
A small fair-haired tot was picking up the wonders she found around her feet and holding them up for her doting dad to admire.
I waded in and swam around lazily in the cold water that was surprisingly warm a few feet below the surface. Looking down I saw a small school of fish flashing brilliant green as they moved slowly, a few metres below me.
At that moment I wished my camcorder was waterproof so I could capture this sight for my kids back home.
Several weeks later, I happened to lay my hands on just such a kind of camera – the Panasonic SDR-SW20 – at a press launch of the product.
The compact SW20 records on SD cards, is waterproof up to 1.5 metres, shockproof up to 1.2 metres (yes, I did drop one to check) and dustproof to boot. It was just the thing I needed on that balmy morning in Bentota.
Chalk it up to another of life's regrets. Perhaps the next time I go on a trip I'll take an SW20 along. Actually, I could have used one later that afternoon, but I'm getting ahead of myself as usual.
Let me start at the beginning.
Early last month, an e-mail 'pinged' into my inbox. It was an invitation from Panasonic to enjoy a relaxing soak in the sea off Ras Al Khaimah.
Oh yes, they would also be launching an exciting camera, the invitation hinted. So there we were – two contingents of press folk mixing business with pleasure on a balmy afternoon.
Panasonic certainly believes in doing things in style. Since one of the cameras they were launching was waterproof, they decided a boring launch where the press toy around with the goodies wouldn't do.
"We thought you should test it where it should be tested," said Yasuo Kimoto, manager of the consumer electronics department for Panasonic Marketing Middle East. And that was the shallow sea off RAK's coastline.
So after a general unveiling of the wares at the Al Hamra Fort Hotel and a leisurely lunch we were ferried to the nearby marina, still under development.
We were all armed with cameras. Since I opted out of water activities fearing an impending cold, I strapped on an SD9 (billed "the world's smallest and lightest 3CCD full-HD camcorder").
HD as in high definition. Wow! HD and palm-sized contraptions are a new marriage, at least for a technically-challenged person like me.
It certainly is the smallest I've held in my hands. It is less than half the size of my palm, and it didn't feel like there was anything there.
"Feather light" might be an advertising cliché, but it definitely appears to have been coined with this product in mind. Imagine being able to wave your hands around with it strapped to your palm... just what an amateur like me is liable to do.
This new gizmo seems to be the way Panasonic is going: more compact, less complicated (many of them use hassle-free SD cards in the place of the mind-boggling array of formats available), but hi-tech.
Apart from the features already mentioned, the little beauty I held in my hands had a Leica Dicomar lens, Dolby Digital recording, 10x optical Zoom, Face Detection and even Quick-Start which pre-records six seconds of footage.
In other words, the camera starts recording before you take aim and shoot, "for all those occasions that come with no warning, when you wish you had been ready with a camera".
Hmm, a useful feature if you are a sports photographer. Later, I discovered it could well apply to just about anybody: I wish I had it when a colleague floundered in the water later that afternoon – I would have had something to hold over him in future!
The 6.8 cm wide LCD screen is convenient for viewing what you are shooting or have already shot. In some models, like the HDC-SD9 and HDC-HS9, the screen has 3 megapixels and a 170°-wide viewing angle – an advantage in high-angle and low-angle photography as we discovered while shooting on the pitching yacht.
Just to get a feel of all the new cameras, we swapped models among ourselves. The H60 was as impressive as the SD9. A hybrid model that records on both HDD (hard disk drive) and SD card, it has most of the features mentioned earlier.
More importantly, the HDD capacity is 60 GB (which, according to Panasonic, makes for 54 hours of recording time) and 50x Zoom that pulls in so tight, I could see where the blue faded into silvery white on some of the fish frolicking in the water below us. Image stabilisation took care of the pitching and weaving of the boat.
There were easier subjects to shoot, too. The boat crew inlcuded a Polynesian lady who, with a little persuasion, agreed to demonstrate the intricacies of the popular Hawaiian dance, Hula.
To the naked eye, her hips seemed to be moving with blurring speed, but the camera captured it all perfectly and clearly. The less glamorous of the line-up, the DVD and the Mini DV camcorders, also do a very decent job – even on standard definition. In fact, the D50 records on DVD as well as SD card.
So, what's the problem? Well, I'd be hard pressed to choose from among these hi-tech cameras. Therein lies the rub!
