Looking for UW camera and housing advice

Hi all

I am an instructor working in Thailand and I am looking to buy a camera and housing.

I dream of the canon digital rebel xt but is well out of my price range at the moment. I have seen some reasonable results with the new canon powershot s80 with ikelite housing, I would like something small i'sh for when I am working with the possibility of attaching external light sourse. I am looking for something that is great at macro as I see so much working on the liveaboard and reasonable for those manta and whale shark shots.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

PS, is it really worth considering a camera with RAW mode as I like to adjust the pics in Photoshop afterwards.

Welcome to Wetpixel!

The XT is a super camera. My first advice is to look for a used Rebel XT, Rebel or Nikon D70 and housing.

The Canon S80 is a very good choice. The images look crisp and are not over-processed. This is a top choice if you want to shoot with just the camera, due to the wider lens. It's got full manual control and you can definitely add a strobe. The Canon housing is smaller, but the Ikelite housing is made from heavier materials.

I ended up choosing an Olympus SP-310. Price was one reason. The camera was $209 at Amazon. B&H had the housing for $189. That is less than the S80 alone sells for. The SP-310 and SP-350 also take AA batteries which is nice. The downside is that they use xD cards and aren't as fast as the Canons. However I just bought a 1GB xD type H card and it writes very quickly. The SP-310 has RAW, and it only takes about 5-6 seconds to write. JPEGs only take a second. I also like the in-camera RAW editing. You can do basic adjustments to white balance and a few other settings. Then you can save them as a JPEG file.

The Canon S80, Olympus SP-310 and SP-350 all can work with external strobes and lenses. The SP-350 has a hot shoe, so if you put it in an Ikelite housing, you should get TTL with an Ike strobe. And it won't eat up your batteries every dive.

Yeah Wetpixel is a great site and I am impressed with the amount of info and the number of posts.

Thanks for the advice I will take a look at the ones you suggested, it's easier to decide on a new car than a camera. My head hurts.

I bought my Sanyo Xacti C6 with the purpose of taking video while scuba diving. A case is manufactured by Epoque, model number EHX-500X and also the EHX-400X for the C4. With this case you can use the camera, including all controls down to 50m/150ft. The camera/case cobination represents an extreemly economical way into underwater video, a "conventional" camera and case would cost at least 3 times as much. In addition the case is pretty robust and I would recomened one to anyone interested in filming outdoor activities from skiing to a day on the beach.

The camera works very well underwater and I have some great footage. I would upload some but you can't upload MP4s. If anyone is interested then contact me through the forum and I'll send you some. White balance is an issue but this is true of all underwater photography but the camera works well in the reduced lighting conditions and focus seems accurate too and usably quick. Most housings require both hands to hold, however the C6s one handed functionality is retained which is another big plus.

However, I do have some serious misgivings about the camera above the waves;

1 The flash is frankly pathetic, low powered, produces wierd skin tones and doesn't even have red eye reduction. This is a serious defficiency which is found on just about all other cameras regardless of price point.

2 The optics aren't the best. Even on highest settings the images appear soft.

3 The image stabalisation is poor and better turned off. Panning produces jerky footage even at 30 fps.

4 The most important problem is the extreem overexposure in bright lighting conditions. The exposure compensation dosn't seem to work in video mode. Is this a common problem or is there something wrong with my camera? Is there a firmware fix for this?

For my specialist application of underwater videography I can't recommend the camera/case enough given the bargain price. However far better video cameras are available at the price as are still cameras.