Chris Ross

No I have the correct data, I am quoting horizontal fields of view that I calculated, not diagonals as I stated in the text. I find this much better to compare what size objects you can frame with a given system The 130° of the WWL and the 180° of a fisheye is mostly stretching of the corners. So a WWL has 130° diagonal field which seems like a 10mm rectilinear but the horizontal field is 106° which is closer to a 13-14mm rectilinear. Likewise the fisheye lenses are nominally 180° diagonal, but the horizontal field is about 140-144° which is something like a 6mm rectilinear if such a lens existed. See for example these two images, taken on m43 - the first is the 8-15 fisheye at 15mm, the second is the 7-14mm at 14mm. They basically frame the door the same way, the calculated fields on the long axis are 67 and 63°, while the diagonals are 88 and 78°. Using diagonals you'd think the 8-15 at 15mm had quite a bit wider view, but based on the long axis field of view they are very similar, the fisheye just includes more in the corners. which for the most part are unimportant for an image.

Your wide angle choice depends on how wide you want to go and how much reach you need. Here's fields of view of a few options compared to what you get from a Tokina 10-17. I am comparing by horizontal field of view rather than diagonal as this generally sets what you can fit within a frame. Fisheye corners stretch a lot more so than rectilinear of the WWL, but usually you don't have important subject matter there. Tokina 10-17 DX: Fisheye - 22.5mm rectilinear 144- 81° horizontal field Full frame: FCP with 24-50: Fisheye - 23mm rectilinear 140-97° WWL-C with 24-50: 14-43mm rectilinear 106 - 42° 8-15 plus 1.4x: Fisheye- 16mm rectilinear 144-97° The closet match to a Tokina 10-17 is the very pricey FCP. You already have the 8-15 so adding a 1.4x to that with a Nauticam 140mm dome would be a good solution if you don't need the full reach of the 10-17. I wouldn't consider the 14-28 for use in a dome, you need at least a 230mm and I recall seeing reports the 14-28 is not that great UW behind a dome.

Good to see new products being released, would quite like to see the specs with sizes and weights, power source etc.

Perhaps or the magnification is low enough that the increased magnification disappears in rounding to 1 decimal place. For example 1.04x is 1.0x to 1 significant figure. With short focal lengths you don't have so much working distance to eat into and diopters have less power at short focal lengths. As I understand it the Zeiss 50mm doesn't get longer when focusing close -i.e. internal focusing which decreases focal length to focus closer- the power of the diopter drops away with the decreasing focal length. The Sony 50mm macro is on the port chart and the magnification with the CMC-1/CMC-2 is 1.4x/1.3x with much less working distance than the Zeiss. The Sony lens extends to focus close so won't lose as much focal length. I would suggest don't assume the value is a typo, rather try and verify it with Nauticam before you buy.

Looking at the port charts I see it suggests the CMC-1 will give you 1.3x and 17-75mm working distance which is a little tight on max magnification. The CMC-2 it lists magnification as 1.0x and 30-130mm working distance - the working distance is more usable, but the magnification at 1.0x is the same as the bare lens, which seems a bit odd?

Very slow AF I believe.

Not an easy choice, there's trade offs a-plenty in APS_C. Canon allows good WB, probably good AF with the old EF-S 60mm macro on their adapter, the 18-45 lens is also listed with the WWL. Sony allows you to use the WWL with the 28-60 which is a good solution by all accounts - the Zeiss 50mm seems to work well with the A1 - but how is it with the A6700? As I recall the 90mm was regarded as a bit slow until the A1 came along so AF seems to be a bit body dependent. On housings I see Marelux now has an R7 housing with an A6700 coming soon. If you were looking at photos I'd be suggesting m43 as a good option plenty of lenses to choose from there, but for video OM system doesn't have the reputation that Panasonic does and AF might be lacking with the Panasonic bodies for macro. If the OM-1 were good enough in video the 30mm Panasonic lens is very snappy AF and a wide choice of rectilinear wides available.

I think this is probably the real key to whether you should go for a rebreather - there are some people who just shouldn't consider them. For myself I'm fairly meticulous and if ever I've had UW issues come up I've coped quite well, but I'm not sure I'd trust myself to be as meticulous as I need to be all the time. I can 100% see the advantages but for 90+% of the diving I do I wouldn't be taking advantage of the long dive times and depth capability.

Hi Val, welcome onboard, good to have you here and hope you find the site useful. Probably best to ask the tech questions in the video forum, not everyone looks through the intro forum.

I can see why they are recommending it - seems mostly around space due to big file sizes and relatively small SSD internal drives from the reading. I do keep forgetting that you are quite constrained with a laptop, I do all my serious editing on a desktop and you can readily install a 4 or 8 TB SSD internally which you could edit from.

Again the interface speed is much faster in general than what is connected to it. I don't know what the price difference between the various models is but it always used to be the very top model was a sizable premium over a mid range one with a real world benefit that was rather small. Looking at those benchmarks if I'm reading them correctly, I'd be seriously looking at 3rd column 16C/40C model if could be had a decent discount, the last column M4 16C/40C model seems faster but not that much faster, and processing time seems connected to GPU cores for video rendering. Unless of course you see a pair of 8K monitors in your near future.😂

I'm not sure I understand what the issue with this machine is, but it sounds to me like a workaround rather than something you'd want to adopt regardless on a more capable machine.

Whether this is actually faster depends on the drive read/write speed rather than the bus speed. The T7 SSD will read/write at around 0.5- 1 GB/sec according to specs I found. Typically the internal NVMe SSD is faster at 2-3 GB/sec, the M3 is rated at 2.8 GB/sec. Whether this translates into a faster experience on one or the other depends on a number of factors, mostly around overhead that the bus and processor are handling. The Thunderbolt interface is very fast but typically it's not the limit.

I think for still images, these days it's not a very demanding task unless you are focus stacking or sometime like that with multiple images. Otherwise fast storage helps load big files faster. So the biggest gains would be in video rendering. I don't now if your current Macbook is portable size, but if I was considering it, I'd be inclined to go for a desktop and relegate the laptop to travel support.

Not the best view for ID, but it looks like a triplefin, perhaps the Highhat triplefin - Enneapterygius tutuliae

Yes I know, but the 787 needs it batteries to fly and banning phones or laptops would create a huge uproar. Hopefully it never happens but never under estimate what might come about from a knee jerk reaction.

It's not the strobe batteries I'm concerned about almost certainly it will be some other battery, just due to the numbers around. Yes they have equipment to deal with it, but if we get a bad incident that is not well handled there always the possibility of a knee jerk reaction which makes flying with Li-ion more difficult.

The Tokina can't be used as it's screw drive lens, but I believe the 8-15 is fine and AFs well on the FTZ adapter. Might be the old 16mm fisheye, that is also screw drive you are thinking of that doesn't work on Z cameras.

The huge rain event in Spain was also related to warm seas. The seas off the east coast of Australia are getting warmer too and this is behind all the floods and wet summers we have been having.

I have to agree, I can do 3-4 dives on my INON Z-240s - admittedly its shooting m43, so mostly f8 so not as demanding, but they do the job. I don't need a strobe to have a video quality light so that's not important for me. Dealing with 16 batteries is obviously time consuming but totally manageable. There's certainly applications where you want more power, but not for everyone. I agree there's different qualities in batteries, especially worrying is the cheap Li-ion, people will buy them from the cheapest online source they can find. all it will take is one bad incident with a cheap Li-ion to make air travel more difficult.

Sony hotshoe contacts are known to be finicky - examine them closely to make sure they are all straight.

A myth, it may charge slightly slower but the flash light output remains as it is - set by the capacity of the capacitor. If it's doing what you want I see no reason to change batteries. It is quite possible the capacitor on the strobe degrades over time however. But checking it you would need to compare known flash power images against each other. Are you still using the same ISO and aperture as previous? Are you shooting different subjects which require you to be further away? Are you more diligent about getting the strobe power right in camera and not relying on boosting brightness in post processing? All these thing can of course impact and strobe power relies on your memory as it's not in the EXIF. I'm not 100% sure I can recall what strobe power I used in shots taken a few years back🤷‍♂️.

It's also a big lens which you would have fit from the front of the housing with the N85 port system I would expect, probably need an expensive N85-N120 adapter and N120 dome as well.

I would hope ISO3200 would be perfectly usable on a full frame Sony, as long as it's well exposed, I've shot in rainforests using much older equipment at ISO 3200 (the old 1D MkIV ) and as long as I didn't pull the shadows up too much results were quite good. Stretching out you shutter speed should also help, limited by subject movement rather than the diver. This image was shot at 1/100 f7.1 ISO3200 on the 1D mKIV and is cropped a bit: https://www.aus-natural.com/Ecuador/Hummingbirds/slides/Gorgeted Sun Angel.html Underwater the even expanse of dark water is more prone to noticable noise but also easier to process it out. The Sony A7RV should be at least two stops better on noise.

It's not that you can't shoot the 16-35 wide, more if you would want to. Well if you are shooting wide open the 16-35 has an advantage for sure, but a rectilinear in a dome has major edge issues at f2.8, so it depends if there's anything important there. If you were happy with 16-35 at f2.8 then the WWL combo at f4 should be a little better on the edges. But basically means with the WWL you would need to shoot 1 stop higher ISO or one stop slower shutter speed compared to the 16-35. You didn't say what ISO you were shooting, if you believe DXOmark, the noise performance of the RII and RV are very close, the RV has an edge in dynamic range but only at low ISO and the two cameras are quite close beyond ISO1600. Noise should all be in the dark water (mostly) so processing to clean that up selectively should be possible.