Dave_Hicks

No strobes or arms sticking out. I did attach a single 12 inch arm with jumbo stix floats as a crossbar over the top of the housing to make it near neutral. Nauticam Z8 with 140mm dome and 8-15mm. I think a 1.4tc would be an improvement over what i did. Shooting 15mm & near 180degs was great for point blank whales and baitballs, but some more reach would have help for 75% of the subjects. I did very little duck diving and was annoyed by the one over-eager dude on our trip who did. I had to "remove" him from a bunch of photos he didn't ruin out right.

I have had fantastic service from Backscatter, especially with the first run of the flaky MF-1 strobe. They also went above and beyond expectations dealing with some Nauticam flash trigger issues. Retra is also very responsive and easy to deal with based on experience of several friends. I had an Inon 330 repaired maybe 5 years ago, no problems. In the past Ikelite service was very good. Recently the experience was not as good.

I load my camera with a 512gb CFExpress card and a 128gd SDcard. I have 10 of the SDcards (numbered) and rotate in a new one everyday as I import to the PC. Its an easy backup with close to zero effort. So all photos are on 2 memory cards and the PC during a trip. I usually have a backup drive as well if i chose to use it.

Be sure to buy the Intel CPU version. ARM is great for everything but Adobe apps.

You are exactly describing the reasons for my position on this issue. 😉

Two months ago Ikelite service charged my friend money and returned a broken and improperly assembled housing. And they would not even replace the broken hotshoe cable without an additional charge. Ikelite used to have fantastic customer service, but this experience puts that very much in question.

A friend bought a used Ikelite D850 and sent it straight to Ikelite to be serviced. It came back with broken hotshoe wiring and improperly installed spring push buttons that depressed camera controls. Unusable. I fixed it all up, but the aperture control and power button were nearly impossible to engage. I had D70 and D300 housings from Ikelite that served me well. When i got a full frame D800 i found that their port system just didn't work for those WA lenses due to vingetteing. This experience left me very unimpressed and shocked at the poor quality and service of the Ikelite brand these days. Either their quality has fallen or my expectations have gone up. Probably both.

That's a good reason. But not one that i need to be concerned about for my needs.

What is color? If 99% of PC and Phone users can only see sRGB, then i don't see the point. Why do i need to see colors that nobody else can? Artists, film makers, publishers can deal with this for their needs. The rest of us manage to cope with sRGB.

Nauticam just released a new housing for the Nikon Z5II that does not include the added width to seamlessly accommodate F-mount lenses. It's far more compact as a result and basically targeting newer Z-mount native users. One has to imagine that they will shift to Z-mount native housings for more models in the future as F-mount recedes farther into the past. EDIT - Looks like this shift is well underway. The Nauticam Z6III housing also uses this new more compact form factor. NA-Z5II Housing for Nikon Z5II Camera – Nauticam To enable F-mount they optionally offer adapted gears or a port body with integrated F-mount compatible gearing. (which is pretty crazy looking)

The Web runs on sRGB and many print shops work only in sRGB. For my needs of online display and creating large format (30 inch) prints, sRGB is the best choice. I personally don't see any need for an Adobe color space monitor or workflow.

I think this model is probably an identical display to my model, but it's been updated with a modern USB-C hub. Mine is USB-A only. (with HDMI and DP video inputs)

I've been using an older version of this Viewsonic 32" 4K monitor for years and it's been fantastic. It is moderately priced at under $600usd. It's 100% sRGB which is more than adequate for my needs, and probably most non-professional users. It was over $700 when I bought it 6 or 7 years ago, so this seems like a great deal.

The design for these adapter models has not been published: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2391114-adapters-for-retra-and-backscatter-hf-1-strobes#profileId-2619513

The model for this design is now available for download: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2391039-universal-dome-port-cap#profileId-2619412