Chris Ross

As others have said you need a fast drive and fast card reader together with fast cards. Just picking any old card reader can be quite slow ( and don't even talk about plugging your camera for many cameras - it's a lot slower) I'm using a Sandisk mutli card Pro reader which gets decent speed. I assume macs report download speed when emptying drives - what does yours report? I get 160 MB/sec with a Sandisk card labelled as 200MB/sec which are pretty cheap these days. The cable I'm using might be slowing it down a touch, but haven't tried other combinations. I could probably get something faster but it would involve time and effort and $$ and most of the time the download is done in a few minutes. That card reader is reported to get 295-300 MB/sec with Sandisk 300MB/sec rated cards. For best speed you want to have two ports on your PC, one for the card reader and one for the storage which is going to fastest as a SSD. I've haven't heard a lot of good things about Lacie drives in fact any external drive using spinning drives bought as a complete unit. I've always used external enclosures, preferably with fan cooling and they are generally reliable.

Thanks @Alex_Mustard , certainly seems like it would be useful for the type of shots I take locally (and for a forthcoming trip to Lembeh!!) The question I have is will it work with micro43? The Olympus 60mm macro is a nice lens and works very well, but it's a bit too long at 120mm equivalent, unless you are on quite small subjects. Switching to a ~30mm macro when I come across a weedie or Eastern Blue devil fish or even a red indian fish and other similar sized subjects would be perfect. I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work except perhaps I'm mostly working at f8-10. Which flip adapter are you using? Is it the one for MWL-1? On the brighter image question I would say if adding a 1.4x TC loses one stop of exposure, then adding the inverse of that - about a 0.7x converter would gain you a stop of exposure. You probably need to add into the equation that the lens is focusing a little closer and this may lose some light. What you actually end up with probably depends on exactly how the optics were designed.

Yes 740 grams would be about right, the photos above have been changed.

Welcome aboard. Hope you find the forum useful. If you haven't done much UW photography for 20 years I would venture that you might struggle equally with film or digital and you might as well take the leap now, assuming you know what you want to buy. At least with digital you can review your pics immediately and make corrections. In general terms the settings you use on film will translate across to digital directly, though the images won't necessarily look the same.

A couple of times I've come back from a dive and the swell had picked up - not fun. One time the divemaster was trying to get people out through waves breaking on rocks. A few of us had enough air left and dropped back down and swam to a beach with better protection to get out. Quite familiar with the swell trying to suck you back out again, we can get a bit of a washing machine happening at the steps sometimes and I got caught in it once or twice in the early days.

I think you might need new scales, the listed weight for the new Retra is 838 grams. If it was 51 grams it would float. I got a pair of Retra pures about a month ago and it seems a nice upgrade to my old Z240s. With the reduction rings fitted seems I get a lot less backscatter than with the Z240.

Hi Bruce and welcome. Do you have a regular Sydney dive site?

They expected you to climb the ladder 😅 life is so tough! But seriously boat dives in the tropics are something else - just fall off the boat - hopefully somewhat gracefully. Even here the boat dives are relatively luxurious, though we don't have gear slaves.

Interesting, never heard of them before now! My first thought is that if it's for video cameras from around 2000 time frame it would be designed around relatively small imaging sensors? I assumed you have asked Google, I had a look and found a Wetpixel article from 2003 (mostly buzz and fluff, but did mention a few cameras it might work with) it mentions that fathom port working with the 1/3"sensor on the VX2000 (6.0 mm diagonal size) Also found that Fathom imaging is still a going concern offering UW correction lenses so should be contactable. My second thought is that if you know what lenses it was designed for you could take look them up to get an idea of what sort of specs they have and match them up with modern lenses you might be able to use. For example the VX-2000 mentioned on the WP page has a min focus distance of 300mm for the factory lens - though the article does talk about using a custom Gates lens as well. Do you know the model name for the fathom lens?

It could also be your strobes I guess if they are slow to charge up?

@humu9679 If I take my time it's not too bad, breathing hard at the top but seem to recover fairly quickly. it soon reminds you if you are a bit out of shape. The worst is spring with warm air but still very cold water, you get steamed on the way down. SO you try to minimise time between zipping up your suit and jumping in the water. It also tests out your leg strength and stability getting down as much as up. I had to do some weight training after I had a minor knee ligament problem and lost strength in that leg. Diving dry I'm carrying 40-45 kg in cylinders, lead, suit and camera.

It would be good also to find out the material they use for the styrofoam collars on the WWl and others that seems like it is good to 100m so should have a compressive strength around 10 bar/1000 kPa. The highest compressive strength I found was 700 kPa or so and density up around 50 kg/m3, but most data sheets just put down >100 or something, I think that's a spec value for some common use and if it meets that they just report >spec. I seem to recall people talking about using yoga blocks which seem quite robust, but I seem to recall people reporting that they collapse at depth.

I must say I'm liking the fact all our dive sites are sandstone based, much less likely to damage you, though they have their fair share of "if it's black you're on your back" areas. Carrying a camera certainly does up the ante in making sure the entry is not too rough. Standard procedure on exit here is to crawl out till you are beyond the reach of any swell coming in, wouldn't fancy doing that on lava even with kevlar knees in my suits.

The other question to ask is if the firmware is up to date? - you may be missing some updates which are related to the overheating issue.

The thing that allows higher currents in batteries is the internal resistance of the battery itself, the black eneloops have lower internal resistance which is the reason they charge faster.