Hi. I'm currently on gap year and am going to be travelling to the Philippines for 4 months to volunteer with coral cay. I've been diving for 3 years but never taken underwater photos before.
I'm looking to buy a digital camera and underwater casing but as I'm a student (a broke student!) I can really only afford £400 pounds. I'm looking to take a memento of my trip home with me rather than taking any pictures for magazines (!) so I don't need anything amazing... but I don't want to buy something that won't produce anything of any quality... only really looking to take photos up to 20M in depth because I doubt I'll be able to get an appropriate flash gun.
I have been looking at the Olympus MJU 410 but I fear it won't really be suitable... also been suggested to look at the 4040 second hand. Could I please have ideas as to what I should be doing for my budget or whether for such a low budget it really isn't worth it. I would also appreciate if you could tell me how those cameras (and any others you think would be more appropriate) perform in given conditions
Thanks a lot
Jon
I have asked the same questions before on this site an others and a common answer was a Canon A95, they are relatively cheap, feature rich compared to some others around the same price and the Canon housings are cheap too.
Hope that helps.
Hi Jon,
I know what its like being a poor student. Not long finished playing that game myself. The Olympus MJU 410 is appealing because of its size and it looks pretty sexy, but unfortunately it is a bit of a poor choice for UW use.
The 410 doesn't have a RAW file capability and only shoots jpgs, this makes adjusting WB and removing all the blue a bit of a problem because you are starting with an image that has already lost some of the information recorded by the sensor (during the jpeg compression). Your suggestion of the s/h 4040 is a good one, many people have been pleased with that camera. Although it doesn't shoot RAW, it does shoot TIFF which will retain all the colour info for later post-processing. I don't know it well enough to know how long it takes to write a TIFF, but that might be something to consider - probably no fast sequence shots.
Another option would be the Oly 5000 which Camera's Underwater appear to have available within your budget http://www.camerasunderwater.co.uk/general...ages/index.html s/h. If it is the one including the TTL circuitry, it is a good deal and might be worth considering as you can add a strobe later. HTH
