Housing deformation

A friend bought one of the inexpensive molderd housings from China for a Nex5. He said on dives under 40 ft. the housing would not let him access the rear button controls. Has anyone else experienced this?

You get what you pay for; and some times you don't!

This happens with Canon OEM housings for their compact cameras. So it's no surprise this happens to a China made housing.

Canon housings have problems at 40 meters not at 40 feet

Maybe this housing is waterproof but not for diving

Canon housings have problems at 40 meters not at 40 feet Maybe this housing is waterproof but not for diving

Not really. over time their buttons tend to get 'sticky' and get stuck at depth, sometimes as shallow as 10-20m when you press the button. Sometimes greasing the control shaft from the inside of the housing may solve the problem.

I have done +200 dives each with two canon housings I had and never had any issues of this kind.

Sticky buttons have to do with improper maintenance of the user most of times.

If you rinse your camera in fresh water after each dive and hit all the buttons a few times instead of just leaving the camera in a rinse bucket accumulating grit and dirt generally you have no issues.

At the end of the trip you soak the housing in warm water and hit all buttons repeatedly again and use a toothbrush to reach the underlying springs.

If you instead take canon housing below 40 meters they actually implode

Canon housing internal buttons start having issues after around 250 dives and actually can also be serviced by the user assuming you know what you are doing and have the right equipment