2013-09-22T21:00:00
Rated 2 out of 5
Design Flaws - but adequate
This camera is by no means a Nikonos, but can get adequate pictures with practice. I took this as an inexpensive way to get photos on the Great Barrier Reef. The buttons are hard enough to use on land, never mind in the water. Controls are poorly labeled, the default of being in video mode rather than photo mode when turned on is a real inconvenience, as is the time-out after less than a minute if you don't re-activate or take a picture. Because of these problems, I missed what could have been good shots of fish that moved faster than I could use the camera. This was obviously designed by someone who has never done any diving!
To get anything useful, it is absolutely necessary to practice with the camera on land before going in the water. Of 130 shots I took, 34 were worth keeping - 50% of the rejects were due to camera design faults, 50% were user error because of the difficulty in using the camera underwater.
Fortunately, because you can use a micro-SD card, you can take a lot of exposures and delete the ones that don't come out when you download to a computer. This way, you can also do color correction and sharpening with processing software. If you want to do any extended shooting, use lithium batteries - this thing eats conventional batteries! I was in the water for over an hour with this thing, and could never have taken the number of shots I did if using conventional batteries.
Next time, I would probably pay to rent a true dive camera for somewhat more money than the total cost of this camera, lithium batteries and the micro-SD card.
Diver J.
2011-10-03T21:00:00
Rated 4 out of 5
Good camera for the money spent
it's easy to use, inexpensive. If you aren't moving too much, you can get clear shots.
MK
2011-01-12T19:00:00
Rated 3 out of 5
You get what you pay for
I bought this as a very inexpensive camera to take SCUBA diving. I had low expectation to begin with and still ended up being disappointed due to one critical flaw.You cannot turn this camera on once you are below 30 feet underwater. The pressure inside the casing is too great and it was impossible to push the power button. On my second dive I made sure to turn it on before hand, but then it automatically turns off after 30-45 seconds of idle time so if you aren't constantly using it, it becomes a useless brick.Overall the picture quality is exactly what you would expect from any [$] camera. Waterproof seal works well.I would have been very happy with the camera if I could have used it more.Steady hands needed for pictures, and the video is kinda crumby quality framerate wise, but for [$] it lines up with expectations.
hammy
