I combined my Lecia and UK Germany housing with a Subtronic Pro 160 and Hartenburger Mini-Electronic Focus Light. My camera and housing review can be found in the digicam forum
The Pro 160 is Subtronic's latest strobe. It certainly follows the KISS principle - Auto or Manual. I liked that. The coverage was pretty wide for a single strobe and packed plenty of power. Only a few times when shooting at 24mm did I feel like I needed a second strobe to get the coverage I wanted. This strobe uses an external battery located in a strobe arm. The battery connects with an S4 connection. I am not sure what I think of the external battery versus the internal. When charging I had to either remove the arm which left my strobe orphaned or take the whole rig to the charging station.
The only issue I had was with the LED indicator light. It would be green on land but then once in the water orange. Other times in the water it was green. Mostly though it was orange. So I am not sure what the status meant. I thought the LED would indicate battery life or ready. Either way I found that charging it each night after 40-50 photos gave me plenty of power each day. I suspect that I could gotten more usage but not knowing what I had left I did not want to be without power.
My finial touch was a Hartenburger focus light. I chose the Mini-Electronic. Though slightly over kill for my D-Lux 4 I bought it because of its build and reliability. I had initially thought about the new Fix 500 LED but even the new redesigned battery compartment left me wondering about water intrusion when opening it. I mounted it on the grip of my tray. The light comes with a 20W Halogen bulb which I swapped out for a 10W bulb. I found it to be more than adequate especially when I descended down into the deep dark holds of several ships in Truk Lagoon and used it as my primary light source. The other reason for swapping out the light was for longer battery life. The 20W lamp at full power is good for 20 minutes. Hardly enough for a exploring the bowels of a wreck. The 10W doubles that time and using it a lower power (there are 4 settings) even longer. The light uses a magnetic switch to activate it with each setting increasing the power as you hold the switch down. Opening the light was simple as it is a screw thread. And charging is just as simple with a plug in.
There is a setting also setting for making the light into an emergency flashing strobe. And comes with a clear lens if you want to swap out the frost glass lens and use the light as dive light.
All in all the two lights made for a nice combination. I will post up pictures when I am back in the states in a couple of days.
