Chris Ross

Hi Deemoo, I would first say that a TG-7 without a housing will be OK for a couple of years then the seals will fail and the camera will die. The seals under the top panel controls are a membrane seal that the buttons work through and eventually the membrane fails. I always recommend a housing even if it's the OM housing which works fine. Once you add a tray to allow you to add arms to hold your strobe the compactness advantage of the TG-7 without a housing is lost. In the manual the fine print says you should have the seals changed once a year. The housing has the facility to plug in fibre optic cables to trigger your strobes. then you just attach them to your strobes and you are ready to go. As for choice of strobe it's hard to go past the little INON S-220, it's small and compact and has a good beam as well as being quite powerful. If you still want to use the bare camera you can get little stick on ports for fibre optic cables you can place over the flash. If you use manual strobes you can set the flash to low power manual on the camera and any light leakage will be minor and unlikely to cause problems.

Welcome Steve, hope you enjoy being part of the community.

Tim has covered the basics of the case for m43. I would add that particularly in Australia also include Isotta in the mix, they are quite popular here and will be cheaper, how much depends on what model you are looking at. You can also opt for the OM-5 and the housing will be somewhat cheaper still, but the battery is smaller. My OM-1 is good for 3 x 1 hour dives on its battery and still has some charge left. Another option is second hand with an EM-1 MkII or MkIII which has most of the features of the OM-1 and you will save quite a bit on the housing. I wouldn't get too worried about whether a OM-1 III is in the works or not, it needs to be announced, then released then the housing manufacturers need to decide to support it and release the housing. I wouldn't expect night and day improvements, most cameras these days in spite of all the hype are incremental improvements. Regarding strobes, no matter who you pick service will likely be sent off overseas somehwere, better to go with a brand with good reliability reputation. on the OM-1 housing - it is 307mm across - noting the handles are adjustable in and out. The Isotta housing is slightly smaller.

So you could see if you buy the viewfinder collar adapter to attach to your viewfinder this converts a 33205 into a 33203. Link is provided above. It's Nauticam 90156.

The 10-22 is 16mm equivalent while the Nikonos 15mm I understand has the field of view of a 20mm lens. If you want small these days for WA a fisheye is hard to beat, the Canon 8-15 will work very well in a 140mm dome. You can use the m43 fisheye lenses in the tiny Zen 100mm dome. You can also use the Canon 8-15 in the little Zen dome at the cost of a little corner performance. I use an Olympus OM-1 mated with an adapted Canon 8-15. Very flexible setup providing a full frame 180° diagonal fisheye with a 14-28 full frame equivalent zoom in one package. You can compare fields of view on a post I made using my setup here: I previously used an EM-1 MkII in Nauticam, haven't sold the setup yet but thinking about it. It's still a very nice setup and being mirrorless you can see the review in the viewfinder without taking your eye from the viewfinder. Very useful with macro.

Cameras have gotten progressively better over time, the 7D is old old now coming out in 2009. I think these days the much more compact m43 cameras like the Olympus EM-1 MkII can beat it and the lenses and domes are much smaller. You could pick up a Nauticam EM-1 MkII housing for about $1200 these days add on a fisheye and macro lens and you have a versatile little package. The other issue is the 230mm dome is a big beast to travel with and to push around in the water. Assume it's matched with either a 17-40 or a 18-55 lens or perhaps a 10-22mm? This gets into what you want to shoot with it is it macro? wide angle? a bit of everything? Do you need a rectilinear lens?

Alex Mustard did a video on the the choice between 32 and 40° versions. You should be able to find it on the underwater photography show channel. The short version is Alex thought he would prefer the higher magnification 32° version but ended up liking the wider 40° version as it was easier to see all of the information, search for the video to see the details. As Dave says you could also look for an old version 45° viewfinder and use the EVF shrink function to save some money the corners might be a bit soft in that but it's usable.

That one looks like the original 45° viewfinder, the difference between the two versions is the nosepiece that fits into the housing. This is the manual which shows the difference, one of which is the 32203 has alignment pins while the 32205 has a flat section cutout. Your looks ike a 32205: https://www.nauticam.cn/upload/portal/20190124/201901241132017209.pdf When you say it's too short what exactly do you mean? Does the nose go in the viewfinder hole far enough to fit the retaining o-ring? If not you need a different nosepiece. I believe this collar adapter is what you would need to turn your 32205 into a 32203: NauticamViewfinder Collar Adaptor for 32204 (from A153408) and 32...Allows for the 45/º viewfinders to be adapted from MIL to DSLR housings. Instruction Manual PDF DownloadAgain you would need to confirm this with Nauticam or a dealer. If someone can confirm they are using a 32203 on a Z8 housing this seems to be what you would need to adapt it.

The Canon is known for being a very sharp lens plus I had a chance to buy the $$$ N85-N120 adapter and the 8-15 lens locally second hand and also picked up the Metabones second hand. Plus I wasn't that keen on using the Metabones speed booster that is used with the 10-17 due to the optics involved though it is reported to work well. I would suggest it is much more straight forward to implement this with Isotta housings. Mainly because they use a larger B102 port compared to the small Nauticam N85 port. I haven't tried but I think you could mount the camera/lens from the back rather than needing to remove the port and lens to remove the camera, particularly if you remove the hood. It's quite the assembly task and I bought the USB-C bulkhead to charge the battery and download images when on a trip so I didn’t need to disassemble it all every day. It's also considerably cheaper (approx $2500 less based on Backscatter pricing) Also the 34.7mm N85-N120 adapter I use is discontinued, you could probably use a N85 - N120 50 or 47mm adapter with a 20mm extension, but I suspect the zoom knob would not mate up correctly and you would need to print the zoom gear I use, the design is listed on the forum. This post outlines the parts list for an 8-15 in Isotta:

Thanks, but I'm not a lightroom user.

The close focus of the Pentax lens is 450mm, meaning that it won't perform well and may not even focus UW with a small dome. The adapter with that big bump may also be an issue depedning on how much room is available inside the housing.

Hi Russell, welcome to the forums, good to have you here. Good seeing another Aussie joining up.

I've merged the other thread on this lens over in General Chat with this thread.

Thanks, did you order the material from the US?, or is there an Australian distributor? Looks like a a $US40 block of foam would cost $US35 to post.

Definitely agree quite a bit of torque to twist the camera to point up. I think a block of foam underneath with a portion of the buoyancy will help - probably want less than half of the buoyancy underneath, so the natural attitude is still for the arms to want to remain at the top