I just wanted to emphasise a few things before anyone reads on. I have very little prior experience using SLR housings. This review is purely for VIDEO use and not for shooting stills. The housing was not a review or pre-production version, it was the full retail product. It is certainly not an exhaustive review, but more a collection of my thoughts and observations after using the camera and housing for a month in Spain during June/July. I actually almost decided not to write this at all until I’d had a chance to use the housing again in September, but you’ll have to read on to find out why.... The only other teaser I’ll give at this stage is that in my opinion the much flaunted stability issues of using an SLR underwater for video could very well be a myth.
Hugyfot First Impressions
Hugyfot are renowned for producing well made and above all compact SLR housings. One of the biggest drawbacks shooting video is that if you want to use a really good (pro) camera you generally have to go large. With the luggage restrictions on airlines these days size matters more than ever before and with video you can often use up or exceed your entire luggage allowance with just the weight from your housing, let alone the camera itself, dive gear or god forbid a couple of shirts and a pair of trunks! It’s so bad that I’ve actually found that with the higher luggage allowances you get it can often be cheaper to fly business class than it can be to pay all the excess luggage charges flying in economy! So the thought that you can take a compact SLR housing like the Hugyfot and shoot great quality video is a very attractive proposition for the traveling videographer.
When you first see and hold the 7D Hugyfot housing you know you’ve got something that is going to last a long time. Machined from a solid block of aluminum it feels reassuringly sturdy holding it, much like any of the top quality video housings do. The other thing you notice is that there really is very little space inside the housing. Hugyfot use the marketing slogan ‘fits your camera like a glove’ and you can certainly see why they say that.
When you look at the outside of the Hugyfot housing you will notice straight away that it does not use snap ‘clips’ to close the housing like virtually every other manufacturer uses, instead they use an allen key solution. There is a very strong positive in this method being that once the housing is closed it is absolutely closed and there is no way it could be accidentally opened. The negative is obviously that you can’t open it up quickly if you need to. After god knows how many hundred dives diving with cameras I’ve never accidentally knocked or opened a snap clip or ever heard of it happening, so I’m not sure if that is a real fear or even if it has actually ever happened to anyone. I’m certainly in the once a housing is sealed its sealed camp, but as much as I hate to there are times when its very convenient to just to open up the back of a housing, make an adjustment and then close it up again. You can’t do this with the Hugfot.
Assembly
Whenever I get a new housing it can often take hours to understand how it all works and fits together. This was no different and at times I became really frustrated with just how tight it was inside the housing which of course is a direct consequence of its compactness.
Now as I mentioned earlier I have very little experience with SLR housings, although in the past I have used and assembled polycarbonate SLR housings. Despite this I was not prepared to discover that if I wanted to use the zoom controls on the lens then whenever I put the 7D into the housing I would have to remove the lens first. I really hate removing SLR lenses and to be honest I’m pretty anal about how I go about it always making sure the camera is pointing down and the lens caps are to hand etc etc. Trying to put the lens on upside down with the camera inside the housing while at the same time making sure that the zoom grooves were aligned on the lens turned out to be a pretty impossible exercise. I tried and tried and tried, but even with practise it would still take 4 or 5 attempts to get it right.
The solution is to sit the housing on its back with the camera sensor up and open and put the lens on that way, but with my anal tendancies it was pure hell to go through that every time. In an attempt to avoid possible sensor damage (my 7D had been back to Canon twice before this with sensor problems) I tried to use the camera without the lens gearing and the lens set to maximum wide angle, but by the time I was in the water the housing had been inevitably jogged around a fair bit and the lens had moved to a different position than I’d set it. So you are basically left with two options. 1. Put up with the lens off lens on scenario every time you want to put the camera in or take the camera out of the housing, or 2. Go out and buy some prime lenses. Option 2 isn’t necessarily a bad option, but it is an additional expense that many would not realise they would need to pay and obviously takes away the flexibility of a zoom lens.
Another major disappointment is that although you can remove and replace the camera’s CF card by just removing the back of the housing you can not replace the battery without removing the camera entirely from the housing. For still shooters this is probably a moot point as battery life on the 7D is outstanding, however if you have liveview on all the time as you do when you are shooting video the battery does not last anywhere near as long as you’d like it to. This combined with the issues of removing the camera from the housing with lenses attached was another major annoyance for me.
After a fair bit of negativity above we now move onto something really positive! All Hugyfot housings are now shipped with a ‘Hugycheck’ system installed to check how watertight the seals on the housing are once it closes. After the camera has been put into the housing and the lens and port is on you connect the Hugycheck device which creates a vacumn inside the housing. Once the housing has been de-pressurised enough an LED turns from flashing red to constant green and as long as it stays green your housing is watertight. As a test I used the Hugycheck on a sealed housing and 7 days later the LED was still green. Its a simple procedure, takes 30 seconds and gives you great peace of mind when diving that you are secure and safe from a very expensive flood!
Controls
Through a combination of push button, dials and triggers the Hugfot 7D housing gives you access to every control on the 7D. Being a compact housing it is also possible to get to most of these controls easily and quickly and with a bit of practise fairly intuitively. Comparing the 7D’s controls to the access you get on a housing with electronic fingertip controls is obviously unfair, but overall it is not too dissimilar than what you would expect to find on many manual control video housings.
After using the housing for the first time in the water I found that the most essential control function of all for video wasn’t working properly. The record on/off leaver would not engage with the switch on the camera properly and often it would not even work at all. Basically the rubber shoe on the end of the metal leaver was loose and after it had been engaged a few times it would move out of the tolerance range of the control and then not engage the switch. My only solution to this in the field was to pack a small piece of card into the rubber shoe which helped it to not slip as much. This hotfix did not solve the problem, but it allowed it to last longer and sometimes it would even last all day. The drawback was that there was additional pressure on the camera control which would sometimes engage the record function even though you hadn’t touched the housing control itself. It also would STOP recording on occasion which was incredibly frustrating and resulted in lots of missed or incomplete shots. I informed my supplier back in the UK of this problem via email on the second day of diving, but no solutions were presented on how to get this problem fixed. I basically had to put up with it until I returned home and got to grips with the problem then (more on that later).
I was really annoyed about this situation, which to me showed serious quality control issues as the housing should never have been sent out like that. Occasionally things go wrong and you have to accept that, but this was entirely avoidable. I’ve been in some sticky situations in the past while stuck in remote locations with things going wrong on equipment and had superb feedback and solutions presented to me by the manufacturers and suppliers. In this instance I was in the heart of Europe and in my opinion got very little support in the field from the manufacturer and supplier. I’m not sure if this is a difference in approach between a stills and video supplier, but I was not impressed at all.
In the water
Ok now to the fun part. I was in Spain to do some shooting for a client in addition to filming stock footage for myself both in the pool and in the sea. My client really liked some of the overcranking examples that I’d shown them on the 7D and wanted to use that wherever possible, but I’d also taken my trusty V1 and Gates Housing in case anything went wrong (although from my own experience I’ve found it very difficult to match HDV and HDSLR footage in post).
My first 10 days was mainly pool work and topside shooting. The pool work with the 7D turned out to be a nightmare with the constant record on/off control problems as I’ve ready detailed above. However if I discount those problems then I actually found the 7D to be good, bordering on great to use in the water.
With a dome port attached the housing is slightly negative but the port is significantly more buoyant than the rest of the housing and will rotate towards the surface if you let go. Like many I’d heard repeated references to ‘stability issues’ with the SLR’s that are now being used to shoot video underwater. I’ve actually had my fair share of stability issues shooting with it above water, but once it is below the surface I just didn’t come across them at all. Sure the housing was not perfectly balanced for shooting video, but I found it no more or less so than any number of the video housings out there for the smaller consumer camcorders. My own theory on the stability issues is that most of the first video recorded on these SLR housings was mainly shot by photographers who are not used to keeping a housing steady in the same way that video shooters are. No disrespect to them but keeping a housing steady for 24-30 frames a second for maybe 10 seconds or more is an entirely different skill than keeping it steady enough for two or three still shots over that same period.
Although I didn’t end up doing as much actual diving as I intended to do I did managed to get down to the Cabo de Palos Marine Reserve for four days diving. The Med used to be such a rich ecosystem that it is bordering on criminal what has happened to it, however there are still pockets where you can get a glimpse of what life used to be like here and this area is one of them (despite encountering a discarded trawl net smothered over one of the reefs within the Marine Park). There were lots of Bass around, Moray Eels, Octopus, the local Groupers were out in force with sometimes as many as 20 spotted on a dive, schools of Barracuda were seen and even Eagle Rays and Sun Fish. The water was unseasonably cold at 15C as when I’d dived in this area before at this time of year it had been 18-20C! Everyone I spoke to was a little bemused about this change, but if you travel enough you notice that things are on the change more or less everywhere you go so it is not an uncommon story to hear these days.
I was using mainly the Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens, but I also used the Canon EF-S 15-85mm and Canon EF 50mm f1.8. I found the 10-22mm to be the most to my liking if I had the zoom mechanism attached, but without it on I found the 10mm end a little too wide for general shooting. At f3.5 the 10-22mm it is ok(ish) in low light, but you do wish you had a couple more stops in the lens as you get a bit deeper and it gets a bit darker. I never went above ISO640 and normally limited it to 320 as personally I find the 7D to be too noisy for my liking above this.
I was diving without lights so for filters I used a Magic Filter which I wasn’t entirely happy with. I’ve used Magic Filters before for video and found that you struggle to one touch WB with them below 10m (compared to 30m on the same dive with a URPRO filter). In fairness they were not designed to be used for video and they don’t claim to work that well below 10m, so they are not doing anything less than they say they do. I didn’t have a URPRO filter of the right size available at the time, but I’m planning to use them on my next trip in September and I hope to get significantly better results.
One of the issues I thought I would have was focusing, but I found that if I focused in the mid range and used F10 or higher then the depth of field was large enough to keep a good amount of any shot in focus. For example I was able to keep a swimmer in focus to an acceptable level for the entire length of a 18m pool. I was happy with that but obviously it didn’t work so well the deeper you went, however it was still far better than I’d imagined it would be.
Overall Opinion
I really wanted to like this housing and in many ways I did, but overall it was let down by too many faults and it ultimately ended up being a frustrating experience using it. For pool work I could live with the shortcomings, but in four days of diving I never once managed to use the 7D for the entire day. Either the record control would stop working or the battery would run down and neither of those were fixable while bobbing around on a RIB out at sea.
Once I was back in the UK I had a long chat with my supplier who in turn had a long chat with Hugyfot. Between them they listened to what I had to say and attempted to address my concerns. Being able to put the camera in and out of the housing without taking the lens off while using the lens zoom gear is never going to happen. Similarly there is never going to be a way to replace the battery without removing the camera. They did however test the record on/off control until they were able to repeat the fault that I experienced and as a result that control has now been redesigned. This housing was designed to be used for shooting stills and a hairy grouchy video guy coming along and finding lots of things that were not to his liking appeared to be a genuine surprise to them. It’s a shame as with just a little more thought and planning in the design stages this housing could have gone from a C to a B+ relatively easily.
I’m going to be taking the 7D and Hugyfot to the Red Sea in September to try it out again in nice blue water and I’ll report back as and when I get chance to jot down my thoughts after that.
Personally Im staying away from DSLR's for now as they are not that impressive ... 
