bvanant

Historically fixing this kind of lens issue has been very difficult. Getting the retainer ring off is mostly straightforward but taking the elements apart and cleaning them is more painful. The big issue is to get them back together correctly without any of the manufacturing fixtures that the OEM guys use (and they typically do it in a clean room). It can be done but depending on how much your time is worth you might just buy a new one. Bill

Try calling Reef or Backscatter, they still sell Fantasea stuff, Reef still sells your lens. Bill

DOF (in general) goes down as the square of the magnification (with several aproximations) so the CMC 2 will be a bunch better. But whether or not it is to your liking is a question. Bill

I would like to try the MFO-3 with the Oly 90 lens but it apparently is not a good fit for that lens. Chris Ross uses it with the 60, I might try it with the 60 for black water but my experience with the MFO-1 (it was useless) makes me a bit wary. Bill

I have both the Panasonic and Olympus 30s and I really can't tell them apart, the Oly supposedly has a bit more native magnification but at the port more or less. The real reason for me to use the Oly is that it allows RC mode and the Panasonic doesnt Bill

with the 30 last night Bill

I have been shooting the 30 for blackwater and out of laziness I left the 45 on. WAY WAY more PITA with a lot fewer keepers. To keep it simplest, the AOI with the 30 macro lens and the Kraken add on wide angle lens on a flip adapter. To shoot really tiny things, add the extension ring and shoot the 60 with a CMC or similar. But to be really simple just the 30 and one Kraken/AOI wet wide angle. Bill

Another vote for Helicon. We shoot (on land) several hundred shots for a single stack and it works reasonably well and fast. Bill

Looking for an AOI housing for OM-1 or OM-1 mark II. thanks Bill

Shoot a bit of video to heat up the camera 🤑

Better the charger than the battery. Bill

I have been mostly using the AOI RC strobes for most of my shooting. The very cool thing about the MF series is the remote triggering, but I don't use it much. The battery situation that would be ideal is if they both used the same damn batteries. Bill

But it's obvious I meant that engineering and design, particularly in context of size, has come a very long way. Meaning if other modern products can get smaller and contain more features, then the back scatter flash can. That is sometimes true, but not obvious. In our world of continuous glucose monitoring it took 2 companies (with essentially infinite money) more than 4 years to make the device about 15% smaller. And one of them paid Google to do it for them. For optical things there is no Moore's law so making very small strobes very bright is still difficult. I don't know how much engineering is at AOI (I think they make the strobes) but I suspect it wasn't on Backscatter's list of most important features. Bill

The question is if I have a couple of MF2 and speak olympus not Sony should I buy one? Not obvious that it is a big difference. Bill

BT parts are relatively cheap, but things get bigger and need support. BVA