E900 vs C5050 review and pics

Following is a review of the Fuji E900 with Ikelite housing I recently posted over at Scubadiving.com I thought Wetpixel readers might be interested. There are also photos from my recent trip to the Dominican Republic.

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Thanks for sharing. Sorry to hear about the loss of your 5050's.

Cheers

James

Thanks for the very detailed review.

The internal strobe issue it’s quit disturbing and also the not so good macro capabilities since I heard good things about it.

Saudio,

First off...nice photos. After reading your review I'm glad that I went with the Oly SP-350. With that said if you're a previous Oly owner of the 5060 or 7070, the sp-350 disappoints somewhat as well. It shares the toy-like quality (although I did flood mine and brought it back to life), and the slow lens of the Fuji. It also shares some of the write time and recharge times of the Fuji. It takes a full 10 seconds to write a RAW file (you mentioned H cards...where do I find them?). 4 seconds to write the largest JPEG. Flash recharge time isn't an issue for me because I use the Oly FL20 with its own housing. If I've got fresh batteries in both, the time between pictures is no more than 4-6 seconds with Jpeg even after a full dump. It does appear that the Oly scores better in the battery department as I've filled 2, 1G cards on a single set of batteries while using the internal flash. While supermacro freezes the lens at the widest zoom, regular macro allows you to zoom naturally. The supermacro mode allows you to focus at .8 of an inch, however, its virtually useless underwater because the slightest movement will cause it to refocus, or if in manual focus mode, to go out of focus. The manual focus mode is nice. If you can accurately gauge your distance underwater you can preset the focus. This speeds up the shutterlag tremendously.

Overall, I'm happy with my decision as a first camera; however, I long for the faster lens and much more quality of build to the older Olys.

I have considered upgrading my trusty c5050s many times in the past 3 years mostly because of shutter lag and write times (in RAW) and was disuaded from doing so by many people. The consensus was that the 5050 was an unusually effective underwater camera and newer digicams were not necessarly better.

I made the hard choice to Upgrade to a dSLR but my wife expects to dive the 5050s for several more years.

I agree RE the 5050 - it's hard to beat. If Olympus could just upgrade the Sony CCD in the camera to something w/ lower noise, we would be set. It would be nice if there was a way to put a Fuji 6 megapixel SuperCCD in there...

Cheers

James

I found the c5060 ALMOST as good as the c5050. With add-on lenses you get some distortion and it doesn't seem to write as fast in RAW but it is probably a decent alternative to this day.