There’s been a slowly growing trend in the past year or so for camera manufacturers to announce “rugged” compact cameras. Olympus pioneered much of this area with their Stylus Tough series and today Casio announced a new compact called the EX-G1, borrowing from Casio’s “G” shock brand that became so popular amongst adventure enthusiasts.

The big deal about rugged cameras is they usually sport three main features:

• Shock resistant (in the case of the EX-G1, drop tested at 7 feet)
• Waterproof (up to a depth of 10 feet)
• Freezeproof (down to 14 degrees F for the G1)

In addition to that, the G1 carries much of the features you’d expect to see in a regular digital compact including 12 MP, 3x optical zoom, 16×9 movies, etc. The Casio differentiator is that this is comes in an ultra slim form factor – the slimmest for a camera of this type. Full list of specs can be seen over at dpreview.com. The G1 carries the slightly smaller sensor size of 1/2.3″ CCD, so don’t expect image quality on par with the market leading Panasonic LX3… but these cameras are differentiated on the basis that they can take picture in environments that were simply not possible before (or at least, not without underwater casing, etc). The big question of course is whether the rugged features are useful / important enough to overcome the compromises that have to be made. If you’re an adventure type there is a good case for it – and clearly the manufacturers think so. In fact, they’re not solely marketing the cameras to the outdoors market – here’s a great Olympus ad, one of my favourite ways I’ve seen rugged camera’s unique features marketed:

Anyone interested in pre-ordering this camera (which should ship in Dec 09) can do so at the links below:

Other options in the rugged camera space are:

• Panasonic DMC-TS1
• Olympus Stylus 6000
• Canon D10

If one happens to come my way, I’ll do an in depth review.