RomiK

Yes there is. Just wanted to clarify my post - @Davide DB summed the issues with Chinese really well and exactly to experience I had. Good luck everyone selecting their monitor.

@brightnight summed it up really well. On paper and pictures these Krakens and weefines look good but there is a good reason why there aren’t favorable reviews to be found apart from the paid cheerleaders. Chinese just slap the monitor into waterproof housing and when selling it they even do not bother to remove features such as “usb port for LUT import” or “sd card slot” 😂. Heck Kraken can’t even get dimensions right in their official manual. When I wrote them when they could ship I got answer in next hour. Subsequent question about the sd card is unanswered to this day 😂 I have had terrible experience with WED7 from weefine - software issues, freezing software, screen lamination smears visible in broad light and off course 400 nits is unusable in daylight. And plus it’s a brick in the water and necessary compensations make it cumbersome to use. Angler looks good with good buoyancy and with that huge shade might even be usable in daylight. But for just few dollars more there is Shinobi with 1000nits HDR screen and that’s the route I ultimately chose. I will post picture including compensations soon.

Same experience here. I just like dome images much better than wet optics. 20-70F4 or even 16-35F4PZ produce nicer images than 28-60/WWL1B or EMWL in my experience and opinion. The subject sharpness and more importantly the micro contrast of these images just make them stand out for comparable shots. 20-70F4 is amazing lens for dives expecting unexpected 🙂 Here a quick shot from Maldives 'channel sharks' location. While observing sharks with wide angle this little beauty just popped among us by the reef hooks 🙂 - 20-70F4 at 70mm F4

It’s processed though 🙈🙂

Nice video and setup Alex! Another option is to balance the weight masses independently such as here Retras with superchargers each arm with 900g and EMWL with extra 900g. Completely neutral and offers flexibility of placing strobes independently. Plus shooting upwards is somewhat easier. Beautiful thing on this activity is that each path has it own solutions isn’t it 🙂

Ha-ha, funny, I was toying with the same idea time to time but no, it’s not practical especially for the locations with current you mentioned. I use my EMWL130 with A1 and 90mm and yes, it’s major PITA for anything else than to drop from the boat and exploring nearby. It allows for great non macro shots though as you can stick it where normal dome camera wouldn’t fit and get great shots with that open background. Imagine lionfish next to corral with sun ball etc. But it’s Red Sea with no hostile environment like Indonesia 🙂. For balancing one 900g floatie placed on macro port hot shoe will do but that’s not highlight either and the rig is simply little too big for currents. Another factor to consider - optical quality will suffer, you image travels 3 times through water contact and plus you have 3 times the chance getting a debris there. Aside from debris I found the image not as sharp as from the dome setup. For what you want to do next month on the trip to Maldives I will try WWL1B paired with 28-60 and accompanied with CMC2 as both allow fast switch by bayonet. I am quite happy with WWL so I assume the CMC2 will do simple macro on the same dive. Having said that I just got Shinobi monitor and housing so the next thing is to try EMWL without relay lens using the Flip option on the monitor to see things not upside down. That setup I would try use for macro dives where I wouldn’t want to miss wide angle. Cheers.

As recently as couple days ago I was in the same situation which monitor solution I should give a second go. So it's still in my head and so I might be long on this one 🙂 I actually bought this Divevolk solution after having terrible experience with Weefine's WED7 couple years ago. The problem with workarounds like divevolk is that they do not tend to work when one would need them. Forget about the lag, it's not that bad, the connection and the reliability of establishing it over and over - at least on Sony - is the real issue for me. So when I imagined logistics on a live aboard where most of my dives are with 3-4 dives per day checking the footage in between the dives - it was a real nightmare. Plus the element attached to the housing should be placed on acrylic effectively blocking access to camera monitor... So I swallowed the pill and bought Shinobi with Nauticam housing... I was also researching the other Chinese units, Kraken with their 3000 nits looked promising but all that proved to be a vaporware. For one their negative buoyancy is like 600+ grams (what they say, so double it, I think Wed7 was like 1000g if I remember well) and second they lie in their marketing specs about the size, ability to import LUTs etc... And so the available options for at least 1000nits monitor shrunk quite a bit and since I preferred long battery life over recording capability it was Shinobi. Good luck.

Hi there! Found this forum when tempering my GAS 🙂 . Got my first camera in 1978 (I guess I am old 🙂 ) but I started diving only in 2018 as there was a lot of BS among malawi cichlid keepers and I wanted to know how the fish really lived. So I bought GH5S and Aquatica housing and flew to complete my AOWD to Nkhata Bay, Malawi with altitude diving experience as a bonus 🙂 (did you know lake Malawi lies about 500m above sea level... 🙂 ) Fast forward 5 years and 500 dives with most of it with side mount I switched to Sony A1 in Nauticam eco system, even got me EMWL 🙂 , Retra flash, some 12000l solar flares for video and my hobby lately is to print my pictures in 1x2m wall tiles as my dentist offered me a sweet barter deal if decorating his clinic 🙂 . So A1 would be paid for now if it wasn't for my teeth 😄 . Cheers! 🙂