I purchased a Subal D10 housing in April for use with my D100 on a two-month diving trip through Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia during May and June. I waited that long because I was hoping to purchase the Light and Motion Titan D100 housing because of the ROC strobe controller, but once it came down to the wire, it looked like they would not release it in time for my trip. I was also concerned about reputed reliability problems with Light and Motion products, and had heard very good things about the reputation of Subal products. When I decided to purchase the Subal D10 housing, I thought that the all-mechanical nature of the housing would go a long ways to ensuring that I would be able to use the rig without failures. Unfortunately, this was only partly true.
As soon as I got the rig home from Backscatter, I discovered a problem with the shutter release mechanism, which seemed to frequently fail to fully depress the shutter button. Because I had so little time before leaving, I elected not to return the unit, and instead used some super-glue to attach a small piece of plastic to the mechanism, to act as a shim. This worked adequately well, but it was my first dissapointment of many to come.
The next problem came while I was on a dive boat in Sipidan, on my fourth dive, and the first using the FE2 wide-angle dome port. After the dive, while back in the boat holding the rig in my lap with a neoprene dome cover in place, the dome suddenly fell off the housing, went between my legs and landed squarely on the boat's deck with a resounding thud. To say I was startled would be an understatement. Apparently a small pin which prevents over-rotation of the port in the housing's port mount had sheared off, allowing the port to rotate into a position that allowed it to come out of the housing. There was very little friction to hold the port in position while above water. I verified that I was using the correct, newer style "thick" o-ring on the port. Underwater, ambient pressure created sufficient friction to prevent port rotation, but above water, I had to resort to using duct tape to keep the port from falling off. Not good! The port was fortunately undamaged in the fall.
The next problem was discovered while in Papua New Giunea, aboard the Peter Hughes Star Dancer. I had not been able to use the SB80DX strobe housing from Subal in TTL mode, and finally figured out that the problem was in the strobe sync cord connector harness inside the D10 housing. Because of incompatibility between TTL and D-TTL signalling, Subal had elected to not solder the TTL signal leads on the hotshoe connector of the sync cable assembly, thus preventing me from using the D-TTL strobe housing I bought from them for $$$ ($700? I forget now.) I decided to perform Yet Another Subal Jury-Rig, and managed to solder the TTL signal leads to the wiring harness using a kitchen knife and propane blow-torch, since there was no soldering iron on the boat. This worked, and allowed me to use the SB80DX for macro TTL, which I enjoyed doing. However, I was forced to disconnect the TTL signal wires on one of the sync cord ports in order to avoid damaging the YS90DX (or would the strobe damage the camera? I forget now.) This meant that when shooting with two YS90DX strobes, one of them had to be in slave mode, and I could only plug the SB80DX into one of the two ports, but it at least allowed me to shoot TTL. I soon discovered problems with the SB80DX housing which made the D-TTL function fail intermittently, which I have addressed in a separate posting in the Lighting forum of this site. I managed to mostly fix that problem with another jury-rig involving duct tape.
In addition to these problems, I was frustrated by the poorly-functioning mode selector knob, which was very difficult to rotate at depths. I also didn't like the very slow action of the aperature knob, as mentioned by previous posters. I still prefered to use the front knob for aperature, instead of switching to the rear shutter-speed knob for adjusting the aperature. It meant I needed to watch one of the aperature indicator read-outs instead of knowing how many stops I'd changed it by feel alone, which I would greatly prefer doing. Also, the CSM focus-mode switch was a defective design, and did not allow switching into Continuous focus mode, which I fortunately did not want to do anyhow. There was a note included with the housing which alerted me to this problem. The rest of the product documentation was of dismally poor quality, I have to also mention.
After returning to California, I returned the whole rig to Backscatter in early July for warranty repair of the numerous problems. I have yet to receive the rig back from them, although I got a call yesterday claiming they finally received the new parts from Subal and would finish the repairs and ship it to me at the end of this week. I'll believe that when I have the unit in my hands 
Subal still hasn't come up with a fix for the SB80DX strobe housing problem, however.
One the one hand, I did enjoy the all-mechanical nature of this housing, because it allowed me to make field "repairs" and keep shooting, although not without a great amount of frustration. On the other hand, I was quite dissappointed with all of the product quality problems I experienced with this expensive, "top of the line" system. Subal receives poor marks from me for product quality, but even worse marks for service and support. Many months have gone by while waiting for them to ship replacement parts, and they were reticent to admit design faults with their products, according to Backscatter.
Fortunately, despite the numerous problems I had with my housing system, I still managed to get a few good shots, and just this weekend learned that three of my images had placed in the Novice Digital Macro category of the Northern California Underwater Photographic Society SEA2003 competition, earning me a week-long trip on the Aquacat liveaboard in the bahamas! Woohoo! Now I need to figure out what kind of rig I'll bring 
