Subal D10 housing for the D100

Alex,

Next time your think of diving Stoney give me a shout. We'll test & compare your D100 with my E10 setup (when it arrives) & post to the site. We could fire away at a nice shallow feature, like the cockpit or the UW pub and get a good backdrop shot with sunrays (if lucky!)

Don't think we should use GIMME THE BLUES though. GREENS is more appropriate for Stoney!

Mark

The weird aritfact is a bird. The sunset shot was taken using the Tamarron 24 to 135. It does look like their might be some lens flare in the clouds. I will have to experiment further. It was my first try at a sunset with a D100 and I wanted to see what would happen. Dynamic range doesn't seem to be much of a problem with D100 vs a point and shoot digital camera.

The S2 will do TTL, but I found that the manual controller from Ike was easier to use and get good images than using TTL (comparing it with an F100)

The ergonomics and access to controls on the Subal D10 housing are a work of art. Program your back lever to operate the autofocus. Set your shutter on contious and you can fire away.

Any defects in the images posted are operator error and not a deficiency of the system. That was my first try and I have a lot to learn about the system.

I agree that the D10 from Subal housing is superb, but I am not convinced by all the ergonomics of the D10.

My minor problems are I find that there is no direct indication of the position of the function dial plus the gearing on the aperture dial is very long. If the aperture is set in 1/3 stop graduations (which is useful for manual flash exposure) then it requires 5 and 3/4 complete turns to get from f2.8 to f22 - which is a bit of a pain. Certainly I cannot rock the dial between apertures like I can with the N10 housing for my F100.

I realise that the housing has 25 camera controls. And most are faultless. But these two are probably the most used after the shutter.

I realise that for Subal the D10 is never going to be a long term seller, plus with so many controls to work on it is hard to get them all up to their usual standard in time to hit the market with this short lifespan camera. However in these respects I feel the housing is not up to the ergonomic standards of the F100 and F80.

Don't know what you think, Dave?

Sorry to be over critical but i hope these comments are of value to others in this group who might be considering parting with large amounts of cash.

I do love the system really!

Alex

I have to say that I have found the matrix metering of the D100 noticably inferior to my F100 on land (I am forced to use spot more with the D100), but so far it has been very good in the water - possibly surprisingly. This may be my misconception because of the instant image review of digital. Whereas it is at least a few days before I see my slides and don't think twice about dispatching the wrong exposures to the bin!

The autofucus on the D100 (Multi-Cam 900) is significantly poorer than F100 (Multi-CAM 1300) too.

The one drawback is the gearing on the aperature setting dial. I don't see the complaint with the function dial. I dont see anyway to make one. Put a marki on your dial and try to line it up the same way every time. That would do it but I think the hassle of lining it up wouldn't be worth it. The atuofocus is not as good as the F100. But I was surprised how good it was. I presume the same as in a N80? Seems better than the N70 I use to shoot with. :ph34r:

Hi Dave,

Yeah, of course depends what you compare it with.

My gripes are only minor. Interestingly with the function dial the plastic mock-up of the housing that I saw at the Antibes festival in France in October had markings on it suggesting that Subal had a solution in mind. (also the housing didn't have the AF-Lock lever - now I really am a geek!) See the plastic prototype

I guess once you are in the field with the system (like you have been) an not using it for a couple of hours after work (like I have been!) you soon get used to the function dial and can just count between the 8 positions. Part of the reason I was in the pool was to try out all the settings so I guess I was playing with it more than I would when trying to get nice pictures.

Alex

The gearing on the aperature command dial may bother some people. With my old F100 Subal housing you could rapidly rotate through the Fstops while another finger remained on the shutter. You have to spin the knob a lot more on this housing to change F stop due to the gearing.

Has anyone used a houisng for the N80 ? perferably the Subal. I'm curious if it has the same characteristics.

It would be harder to rapidly change F stops due to this. I didn't have a problem, but was only able to shoot macro so it didn't come up

I also had a little problem with the function dial due to the lack of markings. But I feel it was due to my lack of familiarity with the functions of the camera. Afterwards I practiced with the dial and now find no problem operating the funtion dial in the housing. I only need to switch between manual and ISO. They are next to each other on the dial so it turned out easy to do in the housing. The dial design on the camera itself is a little awkward and I feel is the basic difficulty here.

Note that thru the custom menu in the camera you can switch the function of the 2 command dials on the D100. This allows you in manual mode to to change the F stop with the back dial on the houisng. This dial works very quickly and you will have no problem rapidly changing your F stop; underwater or on the surface. Easy to change and you can access the menu when the camera is in the houisng. Doing this I found the slow gearing to the front command dial in the housing to be of no problem. This would also work if the camera was in Aperature priority mode. :freak:

D100

Dave,

That is such a great tip and a fabulous bit of lateral thinking.

I really like this list!

Alex

The same holds true for the S2. You can set it to "command dial priority" so that when you are in S or A mode, your rear dial controls either shutter speed or aperture. No reaching around to the front.

HTH

James

Actually I felt dumb taking a week to figure this out. Especially when the first thing I did was to reprogram the camera so the back lever to the AE lock button would operate the auto-focus instead.

I revised my homepage with more pics of the D100. You should be able to get a better idea of the housings design. Also a few more images. Still all macro.

I had trouble with the manual strobe controller so the new shots were done with manual strobe power. Not sure if it was the controller or a bad synch coord. Have sent them to Ike for eval.

Go to the D100 page on my web site

Using the back command dial for the aperature worked great.