Considering an Olympus D-40; a mistake? Other hypercompact?

Another annoying newbie.

I got good (for me) results last trip with a received-as-gift el-cheapo (Pioneer) film camera; enough to go from "why do those crazies drag cameras along" to "cool".

Next obvious step is digital. I own a Fuji 4700 that meets my primary criteria: decent pictures out of a hypercompact device. No housing available for the 4700, but I finally ran across one for it's newer sibling the Fuji 6800. (More pixels, still hypercompact.)

So, I could buy a Fuji 6800 _and_ a housing for it.

For considerably less, I could get an Oly D-40Z (much less, now that the C-50 just announced) and Oly's own factory housing.

The D-40Z is nearly as small as the 4700/6800, seems to do as much or more; am I missing anything? Is there any large, so far unmentioned problem with the D-40 or the Oly factory housings?

Also, am I missing any other hypercompact in the 3+MP housing-available market?

Thanks!

--Laird

The D40 is a good choice because you can use the add on lenses and it is very compact. What is your budget?

If you consider the lenses you can use with the Olympus housings, this is probably the way to go.

You also don't say what you want to use the camera for on land, but see my previous posts about having the 1.8 aperture for portraiture.

HTH,

Matthew, thanks for your comments.

Budget: Um, no particular budget really, just a flinch factor at some point that's probably under $1000. (Let's be real; I'm a vacation-diver.)

If I went all the time, I'd go whole-hog, but in the circumstances, I'm looking for something where I have a decent snapshot camera for land use, and get to reuse it diving without incremental investment of more than 1x to 2x above the original camera price.

Right now the plan to fit that looks like:

See any problems?

Thanks.

--Laird

The only possible problem is the synch of the slave strobe firing upon the preflash. That's why the Ikelite TTL wireless units are so good, they don't dump a full load on the preflash, which fools most slave strobes.

P.S. Where are you? For some strange reason your location is displayed as the same as mine.