Sea and Sea - x.35 wide port A1

I own a Sony A1 with a Sea and Sea housing.

I bought a Sea and Sea x.35 super wide port. When I first tried it on land I was disappointed with the quality of the image: even if S&S declares it is amphibious the quality on land is not acceptable (lots of distortion,...edges of objects looks reddish).

During my summer vacation I shot more than 30 dives in sunny and crystal clear water conditions (50+ mt. visibility). The quality is not acceptable also underwater and in ideal conditions: I get no vignetting but left and right sides of the picture are quite foggy and unfocused while the edges of the objects have a reddish tone (even if less noticeable than on land). This is particularly bad on wide angle "ambience" shoot which is exactly what this port was meant for.

I found this totally unacceptable for a toy which cost 2.500 Euro and which is advertised on S&S wesite as follows:

"Achieving a high-quality image with minimal distortion, this amphibious super wide conversion lens is the perfect solution for wide-angle videography It produces professional quality images allowing the videographer to get close and still capture the surrounding scene."

I guess if this is the standard performance or my port is faulty.

In the beginning of July I wrote two email to S&S about this matter and I had no reply from them.

As anyone had a similar experience ?

Any help/hints on this matter are more than appreciated.

Also thanks to any suggestion on how get some feedback from sea and sea.

Thanks in advance for any help

Welcome to Wetpixel and sorry you had to find out the hard way that the X.35 lens is actually a lens designed for the VX series cameras (DV) and thus when you put it to use on a HDV camera, the extra resolution demand can't be met by the lens. It's just a standard definition lens. When I had the VX series housing for the PD150/170, I customed a Fathoms lens because I was not impressed with the X.35 lens from S&S.

Even my custom fathoms lens doesn't work too well with the HD cameras.

I would suggest you go through where you purchased your housing to contact S&S. You could also try contacting your country's distributor if your local shop is not responding.

Here is a list of contacts:

S&S distributor list

Scubadru,

thanks a lot for your reply.

I already contacted the distributor here in Italy (I purchased the housing directly from him), he is very kind but he seemed to have no idea of the problem, I will go back to him about this matter.

It is really sad and disapponting that S&S behave like that, they surely knew those problems and still they decided tu sell and advertise the product.

Bad for them, for sure I will no more buy their product in the future and I will not suggest them to anyone