S50 vs C5050Z

Looking at both of these cameras. Do any of you have suggestions as to which might be the better camera for underwater. I have done a fair amount of photography with film cameras underwater but none with a digital camera. I would be looking at a manufacturers housing and additional strobing. The reviews on both are favorable. Olympus vs Canon. Thanks.

Hi..

I've been having the exact same thoughts...

The 40m housing on the Oly is nicer than the 30m on the S50

Oly has nicer lens. The 1:1.8 sounds good over the 2.8 on the S50

Oly 5050 has a larger objective lens. which I would expect to mean more light which may mean less use of a strobe/flash.

Macro is 30mm in the Oly and 100mm in the Canon

The lens thread on the Olympus seems a good idea also. On land you can get macro and tele lenses.

The olypmus has 2 memory card slots i believe and may/maynot take regular AA bateries X4.

The $300-400 extra on the S50.. Is it worth it?? I dunno

I have not seen the C5050 in print to be able to say yes or no..

The canon lens is what you get.. that's it. The features are nice, It seems fast, the colour of the prints and pics on the computer is supurb for a camera in that price range. The housing seems cheap enough and I know someone that has used an S40?, u/w with nice results.

The manual controller for an Ikelite works, the TTL has not been tested by the factory with an S50

I don't know about the Olympus and strobes. On land it seems awesome

Anyone care to "put me straight" on what I have said or missed out..??

Dave

I don't have an S50 (perhaps someone who does can fill in the blanks) but just looking at the canon site:

The C5050 has a:

- Hot shoe

- Histogram and

- 8 MyMode settings

Yes you can use standard AA batteries (NiMH recommended) in the C5050. Battery life (dpreview.com) C5050: 3 hr 48 mins (1600mAh); S50 2 hr 39 mins (NB-2L)

C5050 works well with both the Ikelite TTL and Manual slave sensor.

Both have a 'slave' flash (or non-TTL) mode where the pre-flash can be switched off. The S50 has 3 levels, the C5050 10. The slave flash of the C5050 will fire in continuous shooting mode - not sure about the S50.

PT-015

- has double serviceable o-rings - not sure about the Canon housing

- all buttons/ features of the camera can be accessed just like you would without the housing - you have to use workarounds with the Canon (see: here - bottom of the page).

The 2 most annoying things (in my opinion) about the C5050 - holding down the +/- button and turning the jog dial to adjust aperture in Manual mode and waiting for the flash to recycle in TTL mode.

What I like about the S50:

- features packed into a camera of that size

- Intervalometer

Just my 2 cents...

ReyeR...

The C5050 has unlimited movie mode ie you can fill your memory card up completely with one movie?? I know the S50 only does a couple of minutes at a time.

would make for a cheap underwater video camera!!

What do you think of the picture quality between the two??

Hey have you got any ideas on price rite places to purchase a setup in Australia??

Dave.

Dave,

The C5050 has unlimited movie mode ie you can fill your memory card up completely with one movie?

That would be correct. About 1500 secs @ 320 x 240 w sound on a 512 CF card. As you can see the rez (and framerate) is quite low and more suited for web work. Focus and zoom is also fixed during recording. I was going to mention this but didn't think it was too important.

What do you think of the picture quality between the two?

There is a extensive review of the S50 and C5050 on imaging-resource with full rez images at the end.

Hey have you got any ideas on price rite places to purchase a setup in Australia?

Depends on how hard you want to work for it . I know my LDS has a pretty decent package going for the C5050/PT015 right now - I could send you some details. Or if you don't mind looking around a bit I can give you a few pointers. Your choice!

One more data point: The Oly has been shown in reviews to have more noise at low ISOs than the Canon does.

ReyeR...

Hey yeah... some details would be great... or some pointers... whatever you feel you would like to pass on to me.

I've been undecided over the two cameras for a little while.. But the Olympus is winning..

If I can get the price difference between the two a little less.....

Any help is appreciated

Dave

I personally have an Olympus affinity myself. It really is a sweet camera. I started using them when my company bought the C2000. I bought the C2020 not too long after and loved it. I bought the U/W housing on a lark. I took it out while spearfishing one day and the water clarity was POOR. If it wasn't for a neat picture of a rock boring sea urchin I would have never gotten into U/W photography. Hmm...maybe that was a bad thing in retrospect. Anyway, I got using the 2020 and it made some decent little pics that I could blow up to 8x10. Two years later I got the 4040 and it was VERY nice. I would highly recommend the 4040 if not for the fact they are hard to find now. I recently picked up the 5050 and the housing. I got the 5050 online from Willoughbys.com delivered for right under $600. I looked online at cnet.com's shopping section and found an authorized dealer for Olympus at the lowest price and highest reliability. Willoughbys was great, from my experience. The housing I picked up at CompMart in Japan(before I even bought the camera, actually). That was about $160~$170 I guess. All the lenses are the ones I got for my 4040. They work interchangeably. The one thing I would recommend doing differently than I did is maybe look into the Inon wide angle lens instead of the UN since Inon offers a dome lens that requires their Wide angle lens(should you wish to use a dome). That is all.

One last thing I would like to note for laz and ReyeR is that the Olympus PT-015 now has a cover for the housing lens. This will keep you from scratching the housing's lens port. Sells for about 800 yen($6 or so) in Japan. I'm going to TRY to special order some today.

Cheers!

--John

Dave, I'll send some details to your e-mail address...

Hi,

I am not great fan of Olympus even though I am using 5050-Pt015 set up. Indeed I like Canon more on topside photography. But since we are talking underwater photography, I have to tell what I saw in one of my trip this year.

I had a trip to Sipadan with one of my friends who was using S45 with Canon housing. It was quite inconvenient that the camera must be turn on before you put it inside the housing. Certainly power was lost on this silly design. And the fully charged litium battery can only last 1.5 dives which made my friend so annoyed since the second battery was found dead on Day one (so poor!). We did 4-5 dives a day enough battery power was essential. You can easily find some rechargable or AA batteries (they are so common) but you may not get a spare Lithium battery for S45 there.

Besides, please check whether S50 supports Super Macro now, which S45 does not have it. I found it is a very good feature for beginner photographer (like myself) to shoot macro. Once you get close, colours are out even by internal strobe!

Another small feature, as I remember there is no diffuser on the Canon housing DC300, so relatively more backscatters were found from my frined's pics.

As ReyeR said, it is quite clumsy that you may press one button by left hand and move the jog dial by right hand sometimes in PT015. Another one problem is the shutter lever, it is quite difficult to hold in half-pressed position. Missed fires always happened. These are the two drawbacks I can think of about PT015.

After I saw my friend's DC 300 housing, if you ask me I think I made the right choice.

Hi Dave

I brought my Oly 5050 and inon180 from www.sea optic.com in Adelaide also have a good range of Lens to suit Talk to Carey Or David

Cliff

Thanks all for your assistance,

I've made a choice and gone with the s5050 and pt015

I got the camera a day after a ordered it. I am really happy with it so far.

Cannot wait to go diving now!!!! I'll keep you posted on the results.

If anyone wants to know my details on where I purchased the camera in Australia, pls email me. I don't know if they like blatant plugs on the forums..

Dave