which camera

i'm new to digital underwater photography and have been considering buying a oly c4040 with a oly housing . is this a good choice as i've read alot of good reports on the cannon g2 . which flash would be good for either of the above ?

Hi Mark.

Did you read through the other thread in this forum, called "Camera choice"

There are lots of pros and cons to different camera. And it really comes down to tiny little details, that are hard to notice in the store... That you won't notice, in fact, until you start trying to shoot little fish in dim contrast conditions and surge...

That said, most here, and on the digicam review and forum sites, agree that the G2 has better image quality than the Olys.

I have the Ikelite housing for my G2, and it works great. Setup is a snap.

I have the Ikelite ds50 and their digital slave combination, and I wouldn't have anything from another manufacturer, since Ikelite are the only ones supporting all the digicams "preflash" strobe control automation.

The only advantage to the oly is the less expensive housing, if you can live with the depth limits. I couldn't.

Other than that, the G2 beats the oly on most fronts, like clarity of the LCD in both very bright, and very dim conditions.

But Autofocus speed and accuracy is CRITICAL underwater. With all these P&S digicams, manual focus mode is really not usable, especially underwater, since you can't tell well at all, from the LCD, if the image is in focus. I guess you could do like Nikonos folks do, and just learn to estimate the distance.

If the Oly c4040 has significantly better AF than the G2, it might well be worth it. But from my bried handling of the 4040, and from the reviews, I didn't see it.

Hope this gets you going.

Good luck.

Don

I like the Canon S40 because of size and ease of use. The on land results have also been good so far. I have ordered the Underwater Casing, so hope to try it out underwater soon.

For underwater shots, always try to have a decent depth of field. This gives you and your system some allowance for focus errors. This to me is the easy part, this is because I started in the Nikonos III days 20 years back.

The exposure is much more tricky. Some objects (fish scales) reflect light very well, some don't, sometimes it is a mixture. Sometimes it is the background... The tiny LCD screen can generally tell you if you screwed up, but for the fine details, you really cannot tell until you have downloaded the picture.