Several months ago, getting ready for a trip to Palau in March followed later in the year by a couple of weeks in the Galapagos, I was researching options for housing my Canon 300D. Based in large part on reviews and comments from those on this site, I decided to go with the Ikelite 6870.1 and a single DS-125 (for the time being, anyway). I also purchased the Canon 100mm macro lens and Sigma 15mm FE. (I already had the kit lens, and although it fit under the dome port for the 15mm, I only used the lens topside.)
As it turned out, the Palau Underwater Photo Festival was taking place during one of the weeks I was in Palau. Long story short: I entered as a novice and won two prizes, one for Second Place for a macro shot of a the head of a BigEye, and one for Best Female Photographer for a wide angle shot taken in Jellyfish Lake. 
Thank goodness the contest was not during my first days with the new setup, as I took a lot of really poor photos before getting the hang of the equipment. 
I hadn't had any pool time to play with things before hitting the water in Palau, and this was my first experience with both digital and a housed system. (I previously owned a Sea & Sea Seamaster Pro setup.) My shots got better once I started shooting solely using manual camera settings.
The only real issue I had with the housing was that the on/off control for the camera seems to be misaligned. Sometimes it engages, and sometimes it doesn't. It always worked shutting things down, but not the reverse. What I ended up doing to avoid having to open the housing on the boats was leaving the camera on in the morning and letting the camera automatically go into power saving mode after a minute of being idle.
All in all, I'm quite happy with the lenses, housing, and strobe. I took lots of photos and downloaded them each night to my notebook computer. Of course, the last night of the contest (after viewing my photos but before downloading them) my CF card decided to die completely, and was not recognizable by my camera, Mac or a PC. Thankfully I had software to restore the lost files with me (although I never had actually used it) and was able to recover my shots after reformatting the card. Lessons learned: Always have backup CF cards and always make a backup copy of photos immediately at the end of the day.
Since I'll be trying to conserve weight on the Galapagos trip in June, I'm planning to leave the notebook home and use a P-2000 to store my photos. I've also started wondering about the best lenses to carry with me, without going overboard. As I'll probably never go there again (although that's what I said about Palau on my first trip there, 4 trips ago) I want to feel comfortable that I've got lenses with me that will serve me well both on land and in the water. As always, suggestions are welcomed.
Thanks to all of you who provided suggestions and reviews so far either here on the forum or via PMs. Your experiences and feedback has really helped.
Ellen
