stiebs

Yes, Nauticam NA-XT3. As expected with anything Nauticam, not cheap! Base price is AU$800 which is full break down, inspection, clean and every o-ring replaced and moving parts lubricated. Does not include replacement of any parts (eg, bent pins, shaft, levers, worn gears etc).

Thanks for the suggestions. I've sent my housing off to be serviced (hasn't been serviced since I bought it just over 4 years ago, so it's probably due :) .. and sent my WWL-C along with it for a new front glass. Estimate is 700 Aussie pesos to fix the lens. About 40% of the price of a new one, and less than 1/3 of the price of a 180mm dome.

My GoPro 9 has had a reasonable amount of use over the past few years, but I've never been enamoured with it. It seems that every second time I take it out, it screws me over somehow. If it's not failing reconnect to my phone if I've been rude enough not to use it for a couple of weeks, it has a wonderful habit of giving me SD card errors during a dive, or deciding to corrupt videos never to be seen again. And just this weekend, after 25 seconds of recording at the start of the dive it froze up - screen stayed on and viewfinder was updating, but neither the record nor power buttons were responsive either to push or long holds. After the dive I had to remove the battery to get it working again. And these things happen with SanDisk Extreme, Ultra, and Extreme Pro SD cards, so I'm not exactly cheaping out on SD cards. Some of these cards have worked flawlessly in my DJI Mini 4 drone. I've been considering an upgrade to a GoPro 13, but I'm really struggling to find a good reason not to ditch GoPro in favour of a DJI Action 4 - there's a good deal going at the moment - has anyone else had similar experiences with GoPro 9 (or similar vintage) GoPros that have improved in the later ones? Or do I just cut GoPro loose and try the DJI. Given that the action cam is just a secondary that usually sits atop my mirrorless housing, I'm not sure the the noted edge distortion which has been reported on the DJIs is too much of a concern for me. [Edit: few grammatical errors]

Thanks for the responses. It is most definitely a scratch, and looking through a jewelers loupe I can see the etch marks. I have tried to polish it with a microfibre cloth, also with a bit of toothpaste as well, to no avail. I'm not keen on trying anything more abrasive lest I do more harm than good. It looks like it another camera right might have been put next to it, and a sharp corner of a tray or something rubbed up and down. It is a circular shape, not just a single linear scratch. My housing is due for a service, so maybe an opportunity to send the WWL-C off with it for a front element replacement. Repair will no doubtedly be less than the cost of a new one, and certainly less than the cost of a 180mm dome. My original post also implied but didn't explicitly state that's exactly what I do (although the cap usually goes in my drysuit pocket). That's why I used the phrase "I neglected to replace the dome cap before handing my camera back up to the boat"

I've been shooting my Fujifilm XT-3 in a Nauticam NA-XT3 housing for a few years now, and last trip the unthinkable happened.. I neglected to replace the dome cap before handing my camera back up to the boat, and as a result I've ended up with a circular scratch about 1.5-2mm diameter on my dome. See attached photos where you can see an obvious black dot. There are also two less obvious artifacts which appear in the same spot on other photos. I'm not sure whether they were from something else on the lens, or some sort of refractive or reflective artifact from the main scratch. Either way, it looks like I might need to spring for a new dome. So here's my quandary. I have the Fujifilm XF80mm which is great for macro. That doesn't change. I use the XC15-45 kit lens with WWL-C for wide angle. It works well, and despite being a kit lens is a little gem, despite some quirks. I have the correct port extension and zoom ring for the 10-24mm (and it's one of my favourite lenses topside), but I don't have the 180mm dome to take it underwater. When I originally bought the housing I contacted Nauticam who suggested that the 15-45 with the WWL-C would offer a similar FOV but sharper results than the 10-24 with the 180mm dome. So do I simply replace the WWL-C and stick with what I know? Or do I go ahead and get the 180mm dome and go with the 10-24mm? For travel, the dome is larger than the WWL-C, so I'll need to rethink my packing, which is already tight to fit into my flight case. In theory it'll open up over/under shots (which have never really grabbed me anyway), although from my understanding not as good as a 230mm dome. Plus I still have the WWL-C, which I could still choose to use if I don't think the blemish will have an effect, or can edit out in post. Thankyou for listening to me externalise my thought process, and I welcome any further opinions :) (Also tagging @KevinLee and @wetdreams because I know you also shoot Fujifilm!)

Other than the direction this thread has turned to, this is an interesting discussion. I have hardly ever considered using a lanyard for anything other than stowing my camera at the the of the dive. From the moment I jump in with camera in hand, or it's handed to me from the boat, it stays in my hands without ever being tethered. I have a paracord handle-type tether with a boltsnap on each end. Before the dive, it is a attached across the handles, and is used as a carry strap. At the start of the dive I usually disconnect one boltsnap and attach it to the other one, creating a loop keeping the tether out of the way. At the start of ascent, I fold in the strobe arms, and hang my rig off my crotch D-ring using tether. Since a friend dropped his camera this way, I also use double-ender as well as the tether. My camera rig weighs about 8kg dry depending on macro/wide-angle setup, but is pretty much neutrally buoyant so I can let it go quite happily. I've on occasion used the 10s shutter time to take selfies 🙂 Even in strong current in Komodo taking photos of mantas while attached to a reef hook, for the most part I didn't tether the camera to myself.

Okily Dokily

It might be cheaper to double ship. If you're happy waiting an extra couple of days @ratfish, I'm happy to relay your order on you via domestic post to avoid @humu9679 shipping two international packages.

Thanks Craig. No sense in going unders, so I'll get 10m. Unlike the i-fibreoptics shipping calculator, the real cost of shippng 2m vs 10m is going to be negligible.

Also us folks this side of the Pacific 🙂 Which is rather silly if these cables are actually made in Japan 😕

I have a 10m sample of single core (https://www.digikey.com.au/en/products/detail/industrial-fiber-optics/IF-C-E1000/811036) which is almost identical to the 613 specs. Same material, diameter, refractive index, numerical aperture. Only key different is bend radius - 3mm for the 613, 15mm for my single core. I haven't put it through a proper test yet, but certainly bend radius for the Inon L connectors is way tighter than the 15mm spec. Will make up a cable and run some bench tests and hopefully take it out soon. (This cable is also IFO branded, and I happened across it when I was looking for something to add to my DigiKey cart to get free shipping. I couldn't find the 613-core on DigiKey, and this was relatively cheap. But it appears that DigiKey no longer carry IFO cable - must be a recent thing, because I only bought it about 2 months ago)

Yes, would be better to ship direct from the US. Shipping via USPS, or even UPS shouldn't be as expensive as IF's shipping estimate - I'm sure they're adding a fair whack of "handling fees". As far as import duty, Aus is generally pretty lenient on not charging duty for small value items. When it gets up to the $1k mark, consignment is likely to be held until import duties are paid, a couple of hundred usually slips through.

I'll jump onto this as well for 10-20m (in Australia) Here's the per meter shipping to Aus 😯

Hmm.. I only really know the Sony lineup from reputation, not first hand experience so can't really compare the A2R2 directly with my experience with the XT3. I'm not sure that I'd be going for an XT3 now, especially if you already have lenses and ports to suit the Sony. I guess that depends on how good a deal you can get on the NA-XT3 housing. You will still need ports and gears and lenses. Although the WWLC can be used with other bodies as well. I haven't really used video much at all on the XT3. If you're serious about video, you would probably be better off going for something newer in the Sony line-up rather than opting for the five year old XT3. Does come down a lot to total cost differential though I guess. The 80mm generally focuses really well, although it can get lost hunting sometimes if there's a lot of sediment. There is a switch on the lens (not transferred to the housing) to limit focal range to <0.5m, but on the few occasions I've used that, I've always found myself wanting to take a photo from a slighty further distance so usually I'll live with some hunting every now and then. I haven't tried any other wide combination other than the 15-45/WWLC, which I chose on Nauticam's advice. I reached out when setting up originally, and they suggested that the when compared to the 18-55 or 10-24 in a dome, the 15-45/WWLC combo would give sharper results and a wider field of view. Neither the 18-55 nor 10-24 can be used with the WWLC because they telescope too far when zooming.

Do you already have a lens that you're shooting underwater with Fuji and considering changing, or would this be the first? If the former, what lens/port combo are you using at the moment? The 15-45mm has some quirks, but overall its quite capable for a "cheap" kit lens. I still believe my camera and any lens/port combo is more capable equipment than I am a photographer, but below are some shots taken using it - some in tropical, some in temperate waters with poorer vis. The ship wreck and the ornate cowfish just below it were both shot at 15mm and cropped. The rest are at varying focal lengths between 18mm and 45mm, usually with cropping for framing. Pretty much everything there shot with 2xZ240 strobes in manual mode, and mostly between f5.6 and f11 With the WWLC it'll focus pretty much right up to the glass, but at 15mm will vignette quite badly, so it's only really usable from about 18mm depending on how important the corners are for the shot. The two main quirks are 1. On the XT-3 body the lens will retract when you go into playback mode, so there is a delay if you use playback between shooting. It doesn't do this on my X-A7 body, so it's a lens/camera interaction thing. I'm not sure about XT-4 or XT-5. Keeping the post-shot preview on for a longer time mitigates this quirk. 2. The power zoom can be a bit of a pain. In the housing, the zoom ring doesn't spring back to centered, so can be a bit finnicky to get right. In addition, the Nauticam zoom gear actually grabs onto both the zoom ring (which is a jog-dial operation) and the focus ring (which free rotation operation). When moving these both together, sometimes the zoom operation doesn't work so well. I've got around this by reprogramming the focus ring as a zoom and padding the zoom gear with some tape so it only spins the focus ring and not the zoom. But then the next quirk, is that the focus ring will only work as a zoom on Continuous focus mode, not on M or S. I usually use C with focus tracking, so it's not an issue, but if I do want to use S using AF-L to lock focus, I need to set zoom, then change focus mode from C to S.