I've had a 5D for a year or so now and as soon as I owned it wanted to take it diving.
It's been a long time coming, but I've finally been able to load my credit card up and last week I took delivery of the Aquatica housing, 8" dome and a Sigma 15mm.
I work in Mexico, in the Cenotes primarily as a videographer. I work with SD Sonys and every time I've dived with them, I look at the quality and have yearned for something better. To experience the images in the cenotes is to experience another magical world, and my blown highlights and lack of detail was getting to me.
I looked at affordable systems and was close to investing in a VX2100 or PD170 + Gates. All SD cams, which I could live with, but had great low light ability. The thing that really got me was the 4:3 format. While SD wasn't a killer (all our stuff is printed onto DVD) the lack of 16:9 was the real thrower. With an NTSC cam, the quality I would be throwing away to crop to 16:9 was too much.
I went on a loop of prosumer HD cams, but their price was prohibitive. Looked at the latest batch of HD cams, like the Pana SD700 Canon HFS-21 etc, but there either wasn't a housing that I wanted for it, or the camera didn't live up to the high standards of the 5d2.
So it was after a few months deliberating that I bit the bullet and went for the option of housing my 5d2 in an Aquatica housing.
I will be using this for personal video work and stills.
Anxious as hell, I arrived in Mexico and took it under to see what it looked like. I'd read people's opinion on noise, DoF, general handling, but it's not until I got it wet I could see for myself.
This is a short video I put together at the end of the day's diving yesterday. I had the camera at about f/8, 50th/s and Auto ISO. It's not great, but it's a good example of how the camera performs under these conditions.
I have on order a couple of Sola600s.
[vimeohd]16297082[/vimeohd]
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