oly c-8080 ? looking for suggestions

i'm looking at the Olympus C-8080. It seems to have a nice userbase and the PT-023 is cheap. I'm guessing i can pickup a strobe for it fairly cheap as well. Any comments or other suggestions. I'm looking strobe, housing, and camera suggestions.

You'll probably find a lot of these on the used market, as the people that bought them want to get rid of them.

Some reasons for that are the lens zooms out too much to make it practical for underwater use. There is not dome port for wideangle meaning low image quality.

The Olympus housing is a huge abomination - it's bigger than an SLR housing. The port latches have a way of breaking off.

The image quality from the 8 megapixel compact sensor is generally considered far inferior to the 7070 and even most 5 megapixel cameras.

Cheers

James

I'dd add to that the price is that of a Nikon D-50 or Olympus E-500. Albeit, any housing for those camers will exceed the price of a PT-023. If you're looking for some good underwater cameras on a budget, Olympus, Fuji and Canon have new options with housings aimed at the prosumer level.

Since I almost purchased this camera as well here were the reasons I didn't.

1. Poor low-light focus abilities leading to long shutter lag.

2. 16 second write time for RAW files and that's with a fresh battery.

3. While it does have a WA Port sold through Olympus...I've heard about people bumping the port underwater and causing it to flood.

4. Small, low resolution LCD Screen.

5. Battery Performance wasn't stellar.

Later,

Gary

ive doen so more research and i think im going to go with a canon s80 w/ canon housing. I'll get a strobe later if i get more serious.