Hi all,
I'm looking for gentle pointers in the right direction, but promise I'm not asking anyone to do my homework for me!- I've spent literally hours online looking at different combos, but I'm a bit out of touch not having kept up to speed with all the kit out there so feel a little out of my depth.

Last time I dived was around three years ago, & my set-up consisted of a Sony P150 with Sony housing, YS-25 strobe and Motormarine II adapter so I could use my old Sea&Sea wet lenses. Managed to start getting ok results & decided to move up to DSLR, so sold the kit & bought a D200 with the plan to buy a Subal housing or similar; but then new baby & house-move happened, and that pretty much put the hobby on hold...

Going away at the end of the year & will have the opportunity to dive, but can't afford to go down the whole DSLR route right now. Looking round, even the most up-to-date compacts look a little out of budget, so what I'm looking for ideally is a camera which is good both in & out of the water, which has manual capabilities (RAW a bonus), which I can pick up for not too much money (so perhaps something decent but a year or two old now?); and a housing which has flexibility for adding wide/macro lenses (& strobe) at a later date.

Budget for camera & housing around £300?

As I say, any advice or pointers towards side-by-side comparisons, etc, would be greatly received!

Thanks
Graham

Oh and as this is also an introduction of sorts I suppose it's form to show a pic:

Friendly bunch on here...

I saw your post and wanted to help, but couldn't think of an underwater P&S system for around £300 in the UK. I just spent £410 or $650 here in the US for a basic underwater setup: Sony WX5 (24mm WA, 1080 30p MP4 & 60i AVCHD), a 32GB Class 10 SDHC card, an extra battery, and an Ikelite housing. But I have no idea how much this setup will cost in the UK. Canon SD940 (28mm WA, 720 30p HD) with OEM housing is also a very good system and costs around £300 here - a camera, a 16GB Class 6 SDHC card, an extra battery, and a Canon UW case.

Thanks A.Y.

Just in case it's of any use to anyone else, here's a quick update:

I found a number of Sony Cybershots such as the DSC-W380 within budget (around the £120 mark for the camera & £150 for the Sony housing), but by this point I'd seen a number of mentions of the Canon G11 and the Panasonic LX3 which both seemed to be considered far superior to other compacts on UW forums.
Both cameras are around £300, but a hasty revision of my total budget to £500 got around that inconvenience and I did a little more research. The Canon S90 also came into the frame at this point- essentially very similar to the G11 but around half it's size. I looked into housings, which quickly ruled out the LX3 due to the fact there's no Panasonic housing, & the 3rd party alternatives smashed my newly revised budget on their own. I had a play with the S90, but it felt too much like; too much like an ultra-compact I suppose- I'm not disputing it's ability, but didn't like the placement of the shutter button which I had trouble finding by feel alone, & overall impression was that it's a little too small and fiddly for me.
So the G11 then. Seemed like there were a reasonable number of housing & lens options as well as a reasonably priced OEM housing, but I'd read that it was pretty large in comparison with the others. Couldn't find one to look at in any of the local shops, so did a little more reading online (just to reassure myself) and became aware of a phrase I'd vaguely noticed before but hadn't really payed much attention to- Micro 4/3rds.

It was around here that the budget packed it's bags and left the building.
I have to admit, I was intrigued: small enough to carry around more-or-less in my pocket, but with near-DSLR quality?
I looked at the Sony NEX-5 w/16mm lens (around £550) and the Lumix GF1 w/20mm lens (around £100 less). I liked how the GF1 looked, and the write-ups of it married with the 20mm lens were pretty glowing. The NEX-5 sits in the hand more comfortably, but I'd read that some of the menus/manual features are more of a hassle to access, particularly underwater. I looked at the Olympus too (EPL-1 I think?), and it felt nicest out of the three to handle, but I was put off by the limited choice of housings.

My rationale now was that for not a lot more cost than the G11 I'd have so much more image quality, and the flexibility to use numerous lenses on top. I'd conveniently forgotten the issue of housing, but when I did investigate I quickly realised the obvious fact that it's not cheap, with all the dome ports, lens gears, etc. Near-DSLR quality; near-DSLR cost I guess.

Then I had a call from my local shop who told me they couldn't get hold of the G11 I was hoping to take a look at, but they'd just had a delivery of the new G12. I dropped in to take a look, and it immediately just felt right. It wasn't as big as I'd imagined, and to be honest I realised the size over the others was a large part of the appeal for me- it felt substantial but compact at the same time.

It's only just been released and the best price I could find it at was £450, but then the G11 is still around the £350 mark, so I figured what the hell! The differences are not massive between the two (G12 has better video capability, second control wheel on front, etc) so I admit it's probably just the thrill of having something which is brand new, but I've placed an order. The canon housing looks fine to me, for starters at least, and is available online for around £160; so total cost is a smidge over £600 which is double my original budget, but gives me a pretty decent compact for land-use now and plenty of room to grow if I go further down the UW route.

Regards
Graham

Hi Graham!

Thanks for the info!
I'm sure You will be quite happy with the choise You made! G series is really popular and You really get quite a lot for the money You pay.

Be sure to post some results from You'r trip

Cheers
Karel

Hi Graham.

The g12 is a great camera. And the s95 is out now too.

My take is that these are both great cameras. They provide M mode, but alas they require you to do full manual flash exposure too, if you use M mode. They offer raw, which is great. If you could do TTL flash, in M mode, they would be perfect.

The new nikon P7000 might fix this.. It has very similiar specs to the g12. Ikelite is considering housing it.

Everyone thinks that A mode is so important, and better than P mode. But with such small sensors, the DOF difference between wide open and closed is negligible. Using these optics wide open or fully closed has IQ quality issues. So using P mode with a slave strobe and full TTL for the flash is a good option, in the compact camera world.

The problem with the oly's is their uniform long autofocus shutter lag. Forget them all.

The pany lx5 is a much better camera than the lx3, but there are no inexpensive housings for either of them. Very costly aluminum jobs.

I see ikelite is considering the LX5 and gf1 for housings. We can hope. The gf1 rocks, if you don't mind the lack of a viewfinder.

Neither of these last 2 have optical viewfinders. If you want to use the camera on land, that might be deciding factor.

The cheapers sonys work great. P mode and a slave strobe, in their own very cheap housings. Way cheaper than a G12 or s95 & housing.. Their autofocus lag is generally class leading..

Hope this helps.
Don

Thanks Don, Useful info.

I read that there is a viewfinder for ther GF1 but it comes at a fair price.

Graham

Great choice on a camera, G-series will afford you anywhere from just take photos and up to push the threshold of manual-ness. I started with a G9 in Canon housing and have moved along the photography line by adding a strobe, then lens. Slowly the budget has been trickling along with upgrades, and your composition/photography skills grow to match.

I'm sure you will be happy with the product!

One more thought on the G series. The problem is the less expensive housings, such as ikelite, only offer the equiv of 28mm wide angle.

So, you've got to buy an expensive fix housing,

To me, it seems like you might as well go m4/3s or cheap DSLR for that kind of money. So if you really want to go cheap, go sony digicam and sony housing.

Don

you can get some macro and wide angle lenses for the Ikelite G11 housing: http://www.ikelite.com/web_two/can_g12.html
you can get some wide angle and macro lenses for the Canon OEM housing: http://www.fantasea.com/s.nl/it.A/id.410/.f
But both of the wide angle dome ports will still get you 28mm and no true wide angle.

Austrian UW Shop unterwasser.at builds a Ikelite adapter to mount a Athena domeport giving you almost 180°
and enabling to mount a Raynox close-up lens as well to get CFWA. A very neat, but expensive thingy!
http://www.unterwasserkamera.at/shop/catal...te-g10-g11.html

I use the G11 in a Patima housing and i am more than happy with it, but consider that the whole rig will be roughly:
500$ G11
1200$ Fix or Patima housing
500$ Inon D-2000 strobe
200$ strobe arms, tray and various parts

The good thing on this camera is that the whole rig is much more smaller than a dslr and you can carry it every dive.
You may start with the G11/G12 and the Canon OEM housing and later, when you aquired some experience you step up to a patima or fix housing.
I am considering to sell my D90/Ikelite DSLR setup, as the quality of the G11 is very near but without the hassle to carry a big 50 lbs Pelicase on planes and a big housing under water.

Chris

I got a Sony WX5 over G12 and S95 for the following reasons, knowing I was giving up RAW and Manual for photos:

Photo IQ: I compared many photos from imaging-resource pixel peeping @ 100% and @ normal viewing. Although I could see a little difference @ 100%, the difference is not noticeable @ normal viewing on my 24" iMac. Since I NEVER share photos pixel peeping @ 100%, the difference is just not that important to me.

24mm vs. 28mm: The difference is VERY VERY noticeable even @ normal viewing. 28mm is too narrow for too many places where foot zooming is not possible so I won't give up 24mm for anything. 24mm would've come in handy for this shot:



1080 30p & 60i with optical zoom vs. 720 24p with digital zoom: The difference is again VERY VERY noticeable even @ normal viewing in terms of details and smoothness. WX5 has optical zooming and continuous auto focus for video while G12 & S95 use digital zooming (continuous auto focus???) so their 720 videos quickly become pixelated zooming just a little. In fact WX5 produces 1080 video similar to my 2008 Sony SR11 camcorder, costing 4 times as much so I'll be using WX5 for travel video because it is smaller, lighter, and has 24mm WA vs. 40mm for the camcorder.

No RAW and No Manual: I always shoot RAW+JPEG with my dSLR so I know how useful RAW is for photos, but I also know RAW is useless for videos. Lack of RAW and Manual can easily be compensated: I simply carry a white balance diffuser so that I can set custom WB for photos and videos under and above water, and set Exposure Compensation and ISO values in Program Mode more carefully. Thankfully WX5 has very little chromatic aberration especially at the wide end so RAW is not needed.

The bottom line is the lack of 24mm and 1080 HD cannot be compensated by the photographer's knowledge, but the lack of RAW and Manual Mode can. 24mm and 1080 HD make a noticeable difference in normal viewing so I won't give them up for a little "Photo" IQ difference not even noticeable in normal viewing. We all have different priorities!

Ultimately, I'll be getting an APS-C underwater setup next year, most likely a Sony NEX-5 or 7 with the upcoming wide-angle zoom. By then, there should be more UW housings to choose from. Who knows, maybe Canon will finally get their act together and give us an EVIL system compatible with my Canon lenses.