how's the HC3 preformance?
If you saw HC3 footage from Cocos, it may well have included some of the stuff I shot...
I was both highly impressed and a little perturbed, if that makes any sense.
We have an HC3 at my clinic, we use it to document neurological exams etc etc, so I have a bit more experience with it now than I did while using it in Cocos.
I certainly liked the compact form factor. It was more than feasible to one-hand hold the camera and housing while sitting in a current, as per this shot:
I was highly impressed, I think, mainly because I have had no significant prior experience with UW videography. It just amazes me how much "good" stuff a complete neophyte such as myself (or for that matter my wife, above, who has never even done UW still photography before) could shoot, and even that it works at all.
I thought the housing was "pretty good", certainly it is admirably compact. The handle is too small for my relatively large hands to be comfortable, and the control buttons are a bit odd, in that the rec/stop button is not particularly well distinguished from the zoom controls on the handle, so operating the controls without looking at them often caused zoom errors. The HC3's zooming speed is very fast, unnervingly so.
I was a little perturbed because I could see that there were things that I should have/could have done better, and I am rather picky about imaging quality. The footage (admittedly from deep, dark and low viz dives) has some gain artifacts and noise when viewed on a larger monitor, and I was not aware that zooming through accessory wide angle lenses is basically verboten, so I have quite a lot of raw footage that has severe smearing and vignetting at the edges because I had done exactly that. As a total newbie I suppose I just have to learn that sort of thing.
While being a small camera is a benefit when it comes to travel, I feel that it is perhaps too small and light to allow adequate stabilization when hand holding. I enjoyed the experience enough that I do intend to start shooting video as well as stills, but I already feel like the HC3 may be too much of a compromise for what I would like to do. I felt much the same way after starting to shoot stills with an Olympus point and shoot... the first couple of dives were enough to convince me that this was something I wanted to do, but they were also enough to convince me that I needed to go to a dSLR to achieve the quality I aspired to.
(on a side note, as Rand is demonstrating here... it is small enough in the SeaTool housing that conspicuous displays of consumerism become quite feasible
That would be an HDV camera on top of a D2x/Subal housing for the same.
B) )
