15 hours ago, ubiquitous226 said:

I just missed the chance to get some well priced secondhand Retras locally which would have been great to try, although with the the boosters they lose some of that compactness, and not willing to pile that much cash into strobes for the new versions.

And yes very familiar with the high prices here!

The reduction rings is interesting, maybe something to experiment with on a shore dive here which can range from 10m visibility to 0.5m 😅

I'm not sure what route I'll take next, if I want to upgrade to a Nauticam system I'd want a newer body like an A6700, but then I'd need a trigger too.

Upgrading to a full frame A7RV or one of the older variants would be the other alternative, but I suspect the trade offs in size and escalating cost may not be worth it to me when I can't currently dive that much.

Don't forget Nauticam is not the only game in town, Isotta has quite a big presence in Australia and their housings and particularly ports are quite a bit cheaper.

If budget is tight, don't rule out buying second hand, if you are flexible on what system you get, you can get away from a lot of the issues with pre-flash cancel etc with right camera body - one that will allow manual flash and more so if it has a popup flash or like a small accessory flash. Expect to pay 40% or less of new price for one-two generation old gear. I'm sitting on my EM-1MkII housing and camera as selling is a hassle and returns not that high, so I haven't bothered trying to sell since I switched to my OM-1.

I was a long time Canon shooter and when it came to buying UW gear I went with m43, in aluminium housings the price for the housing is significantly less, lenses, ports etc are all cheaper. They have a small accessory flash that can fire at 1/64 power and is perfect to trigger strobes. Plus they have arguably the best range of lenses suited to UW work. I ended up switching above water shooting to Olympus as well and find the image quality is good enough for me. Full frame is in general too expensive and bulky to take UW.

9 hours ago, Chris Ross said:

While you can attach a Tokina 10-17 lens to the A7C, it is an APS-C lens and the image circle is only designed to cover that format. Apparently it will work on full frame and produce an image but the quality drops off rapidly as you move outside the APS-C frame.

Unfortunately strobe triggers are a niche product which are reverse engineered to work with a great many camera models and to play with a wide variety of strobes, the market is relatively small and there is a lot of work to reverse engineer these systems to give you something that actually works. There are manual triggers available which cost quite a bit less, but still not cheap. If you can get an AOI housing for your camera then the built in triggers do save you some money.

Hey Chris, thanks again for your feedback. The tokina seems to be usable between 12-15mm in FF, and give a good 180 degree image at 15mm. My thinking was to keep it with a FF camera, instead of the more pricey Canon 8-15mm route. The AOI housing for the A7C II would solve some strobe-related issues, but then there's the cost of the dome, plus extensions ($$$ !).

I'm discovering the complications of FF, mostly in terms of lack of low cost options. And I've read time and time again that APS-C is more than enough for UW. And I guess M43 too, judging from many images I've seen. Are your topside photos also taken with a M43 system?