Sony AR7 II housing options (affordable)

Hi everyone!

Newbie here, looking for recommendations on housing options for a A7R ii - without paying a fortune, am thinking of a Seafrogs if I can't find anything else (also open to secondhand).. any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

I got some great advice once upon a time from a professional U/W photographer. In a nutshell, buy the very best you can afford or wait until you can afford what you really need and then buy. If you spend almost enough money and don't get what you really need,  you'll end up trying to sell used equipment in a year or two and still be trying to get what you should have in the first place! 

Hands down, I'd get a Nauticam housing, and two high quality strobes like Inon, Sea & Sea or Ikelite. Call the people at Backscatter or Reef Photo for any of these. 

Hi, I agree with Padimsdt, with a minor difference.  When I started it 10 years ago, it was with Ikelite strobes and housing, they were a bit heavy, difficult to use and triggered with electric cables. 

After leak and cable problems, I switched to Sea & Sea and Inon strobes with fiber optic cables, wow! so much easier, tougher and problem free!  Same with the housing, I switched to Subal and now Isotta housings, both great, simplified my life and allowed me to concentrate on taking pictures.  (Nauticam is also a super housing, but requires professional servicing, while Isotta and Subal can be serviced by the user, a big saving when the time comes).   

But on the simpler side, the Olympus Tough camera and its housing take amazingly good photos, are a great way to start with no regrets and later on can be a great back up camera, I gave mine to a lovely lady who for the past four years has been taking excellent photos with it, even used it to document her discovery of a new nudibranch in Ambon, Indonesia. Good luck!

I guess you already have the A7RII and perhaps some lenses?  I would suggest that rather than thinking about the camera first, think about what you would like to shoot.  Is it macro, wide angle scenics, wrecks,  large animals - sharks, seals etc?  a bit of everything?

The problem UW is that the housing is only a small part of the equation, you then need ports for your lenses and they need to be the right ports, properly positioned with respect to the lens to give the best image quality.

SeaFrogs housings will keep your gear dry and allow you take photos but the domes are generally not well optimised and sometimes the controls can be fussy to get working well form a few reports I've seen.  The standard 6"dome port they offer to use with lenses like the 16-35 will have blurry corners as the dome is not big enough.   So you will be cropping quite a bit out of the 42MP sensor.  Even the optional 8"dome is a bit small for a 16mm full frame lens.

If you are looking at the likes on Nauticam or Isotta, then you you would be looking for secondhand, Ikelite you could still buy a new housing which would be OK with the right lens choices. 

In UW imaging, particularly for aluminium housings costs for gear scales with sensor size, you'll see a A7RIII housing in Isotta is $4500 while a Olympus EM-5 III is $2200.  That difference in price would allow you buy the OLy housing, camera, 60mm macro lens and macro port.  Then you can use smaller cheaper dome ports for your wide angle lenses and the oly lenses are significantly cheaper to buy as well.

It would be helpful if you let us know an approximate budget and what you want to shoot with the system and we could narrow down some choices.

As mentioned by Chris the Seafrogs housing is not top quality and the dials don't align very well in my case (A7 III), this results in a bit of frustration underwater trying to get to the correct shooting mode since there is no front dial button on the housing it becomes even more tricky. However in saying that I think it is worth the compromises. 

Given the rate that new cameras getting announced by Sony and other manufacturer it becomes an easier choice if you want to upgrade to the latest camera, since $500 USD for the housing is easy to forgo then a few thousands in the case of Nauticam or other expensive housing options.

I am thinking of upgrading my A7 III to A7 IV due to be announced in a few days, and it won't be too much of a loss to get rid off the A7 III housing. I assume that you might go down the path of upgrading your A7R II to newer model then you might find it less damaging financially to get rid of your current housing.