Hey everyone,

I've recently purchased an old Subal N99 housing for my Nikon F90x. The housing appears to be in fantastic condition, but when I secure the camera on the baseplate, and shut the housing, there are a few issues:

• Through the housing viewfinder, the camera viewfinder appears sufficiently out of focus as to make any attempts at photography impossible. My housing is not the deluxe edition, and therefore I do not have the option of adjusting the dioptre of the viewfinder. My suspicion is that I need some form of dioptre adjustment eyepiece for the camera itself, as the following image from the product brochure (https://www.marinfoto.no/subal/pdf/en99.pdf) shows some sort of larger eyepiece.

  

• The aperture ring cannot be adjusted within the housing (and the zoom can only sometimes be adjusted it seems). I expect I need to source/3D print some gears to solve these issues, but just want to make sure I'm on the right track here. I assume a zoom/focus gear sized for the aperture ring should do the trick there too? If anyone has any further information on sizing (Nikon 24-120mm 3.5-5.6 D) and/or can provide some good options on where to source these gears from, that would be great.

• Controls such as the on and off switch and mode wheel seem to be slightly out of reach of their respective levers/buttons - as thee only work sometimes (on/off switch will turn off reliably but not on)

Hopefully this is enough information, but happy to provide more as needed.

Cheers!

Hi

The Subal system doesn’t use diopters to adjust the viewfinder optics. You need to adjust the diopter that’s on the camera and then just for the housing into the camera. There are no diopter adjustments on Subal viewfinder.

And yes, you need a zoom ring to change a zoom setting. Autofocus changes the focussing do you don’t need a ring for that. For the zoom ring check out Subal.com. There are number of folks on this forum who print their own zoom rings using 3D printing.

If you have the right camera in the right housing the main controls should line up perfectly. If they don’t it could be that the camera isn’t aligned quite right on the sledge. Occasionally you might get slight misalignments on a control or two which might require minor adjustments on a control rod. But such adjustments are, by my experience, not common on Subal housings. It’d be a bit like adjusting a Rolls Royce 😝

Another possibility is that you need to remove the rubber eyepiece on the camera before closing the housing and/or remove and kind of screen protector.

Hope these help!