Vancouver artist Paul Burgoyne lost the camera in 2012 when his boat was shipwrecked off the west coast of Vancouver Island. The camera went down with the ship. Two years after Marine Sciences Centre university students found the camera 12 meter down and discovered that the Lexar Platinum II 8 GB memory card used within the Panasonic TZ7 preserved all pictures taken with the camera. They shared one group picture on Twitter to find the owner fo the camera. And they did found the owner!
The camera also served well as home for marine species! CBC.ca reports:
According to Isabelle M. Côté, Professor of Marine Ecology at Simon Fraser University, there were multiple marine species, from two kingdoms and at least seven phyla, living on the camera when it was found.
That is the best advertising Panasonic can get ! Hope it gets viral 🙂
P.S.: There is also a video shot on the camera before the Shipwrecked (cbc.ca/player/News/Canada/BC/ID/2459292827)
23 Responses
It is not ad for Panasonic, after all, the camera did not survive, right? If anything, it is an ad for Lexar.
Exactly. While the discovery does say quite a lot about the durability of the flash card, it does not say anything positive about the camera at all. Probably the flash card would have survived just as well without the enclosing camera, as long as the contacts would still have been electrically accessible somehow.
Eh this isn’t really anything to be proud of for Panasonic…the camera doesn’t work. All they did was read the memory card, which most of them are corrosion resistant anyways.
There’s been more than 1 instance where cameras lost at sea have been found and the memory cards still work.
Have to agree with the others; where is the logic in this being a plus for Pany? Clearly it’s the card manufacturer who might get some credit, but we all know that modern cards can take a beating and retain their images. There was the case of a camera being crushed by the collapse of one of the World Trade towers in 2001 and the card having survived and returned to the widow who found all of the images intact. I believe that was a Canon dSLR….so Canon gets the credit? Don’t think so…and never heard anyone say it at the time.
Yep this is a stupidly written article, an interesting one but totally off base by trying to praise the camera manufacturer for anything to do with preserving the pics!
Corrected to make it clear it’s the Lexar card that did a good job. While the Panasonic acted as a housing for the animals 🙂
It says a lot about the battery though… Normally lithium batteries will explode if exposed to seawater. And the corrosion of the camera obviously didn’t release many toxins as otherwise the little starfish wouldn’t have chosen to live inside…
Great story. It’s just a shame that Panacrapic can’t produce a remotely decent camera even if their lives depended on it. (If I were to invest in Micro 43 it would be with Olympus only.)
It doesn’t really matter since you’re a crap photographer and an even bigger idiot.
(If I were to invest in Micro 43 it would be with Olympus only.)
Wow.. The Olympus Fanboy Disease is alive and well here…
Who the hell would “invest” in a camera anyway?
What do you mean it’s not positive for Panasonic? What do you mean the news is positive only to Lexar??
Panasonic: “environment friendly and easily recyclable!”
Lexar: “so toxic that not even bacteria touch it!”
😉
Reminds me of a Nikon ad from years ago featuring a Nikonos 4 (I think) which had been lost by a diver in the North Sea and was found 2 years later. They got the film out and processed it. I imagine that if the water stayed out of the film compartment it stayed out of everywhere else too – so the camera probably still worked.
Nikonos, unlike Panny TZ, is dedicated underwater camera.
Based on the dial positioning and the built-in GPS hump, it’s not a TZ7. It’s a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 (Lumix DMC-TZ10).
For sure this is positive news for Panasonic. Their cameras are marine life friendly… If they have a lot of unsold cameras, they can dump them into the sea, and build artificial coral reefs (or camera reefs?).
Toy camera from l00zers brand didn’t survived, epic fail! If it was Full Frame, it would have, and taken beautiful shallow DoF submarine pictures in the process! LOL.
I think super shallow depth would have made it so the camera didn’t sink in the first place. Perhaps a FF DSLR would have saved the whole ship!
DSLRs also have all that empty space where the mirror goes, for better floatation. I’m surprised there aren’t more tales of D800’s saving the lives of people who had fallen overboard.
On the other hand, larger file size might make the SD card too heavy, and endanger the whole ship!
And if it was an iPhone, the marine life could have taken more selfies, and post them on Facebook themselves, speeding up the recovery.
Why does this feel like staged marketing?
The article is wrong.
The camera is clearly recognisable as a Lumix TZ20. It is NOT a Lumix TZ7.
This is what a TZ20 looks like when new.
http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews/panasonic_lumix_dmc_tz20_review/
This is what a TZ7 looks like when new.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/Panasonic-Lumix-DMC-TZ7_Digital-Camera_review
Me think ZS7…..
It is definitely not TZ7 because of the dial position.
(ZS is the North American designation, the range is known as TZ everywhere else).
Lumix ZS7 is the same as Lumix TZ10.
The manufacturers name it differently for various geographical markets. Perhaps to discourage grey market imports.
See this link.
http://www.dpreview.com/products/panasonic/compacts/panasonic_dmczs7
I’ve dropped my Panasonic point and shoot on more than one occasion. I bought it dirt cheap off of Craiglist for a cycling trip. I planned on getting a couple of pictures here and there… it’s been a warrior. Last time it fell, It did so right on its lens. I’ve dropped a couple of other model cameras before and thought surely it would mean it’s demise.
I just have to nudge it a little when it starts up and voilà! I still use it as a complementary piece. Cheers!
https://flic.kr/p/nebVRf