underwater access to white balance controls

I need to find a camera that has one touch manual white balance and a housing that allows me to adjust white balance under water. I am looking at cameras like the Canon EOS 400D but I simply cant find any information about my criteria. Can anybody advize me on which camera and housing to get?

Hi juncker,

If you're in the market for an SLR I think you'll be a bit disappointed to find that "one touch" custom white balancing doesn't exist. Most camera systems require that you navigate to the custom WB menu setting and photograph an area underwater as close to neutral as possible and then store that reference.

Nikon's D2x has a white balance button on the rear of the housing that allows you to toggle between a number of saved WB images. I find this incredibly useful because of the different WB settings required for different depths. I use this tool to take WB images at a few different depths, toggle between them during a dive if I change depths dramatically and then use a RAW converter to fine tune any result.

White balance is a pain to get right underwater because of the dramatic difference in spectral loss at depth. I find that as long as I don't overexpose any channels, most situations are easily corrected in a RAW converter.

I believe the d200 also has this capability.

Hope this helps!

-Jason

The Olympus E330 has what they call one-touch. You can program the shutter-control (single vs. continuous shot) button to be your toggle for setting WB. Hold it, point at something white and hit the shutter button. Then you have to hit "OK" (center of the rocker buttons) to confirm after.

There's also the button for toggling between WB modes preset into the camera (cloudy, sunny, tungsten, etc.) as with many others.

The 'one touch' method is much quicker than going to menus, but requires a two-button combination. I wouldn't be surprised if the Oly 410 and 510 offered similar functions. But frankly I'm wondering if just shooting RAW while on a good 'close' white balance like cloudy or whatever your strobe light is at just makes more sense, anyway.

Manual link: http://www.olympusamerica.com/files/E-330%...ed%20Manual.pdf

See page 83 for the One-touch WB usage, and pg. 111 for how to enable it in menus first (that button can be programmed to do a couple different things in 'one-touch' type mode, depending on preferences).