My review on Sony A6000 w/ Meikon housing w/ fisheye lens

Hey all,

So .. I'm diving for some time now and for a lot of years I wasn't able to show my family and friends the incredible undersea world , cause I couldn't buy those expensive cameras that were around with their expensive housing/probes/domes...

I bought myself the a6000 , and while experiencing it , I found a cool thing - it has UNDERWATER AUTO WHITE BALANCE ! so I thought to myself , COOL ! let's see what kind of housing can I get , to try and go underwater with it.

I was looking around , something like 1 year ago , and the only housing that was available was the very heavy-duty , expensive yet high quality "Nauticam" housing . It cost around 1700$ , and I didn't want to pay so much.

While I was checking with the other big companies ( sea&sea, Ikelite) if they have any housing for the camera (which at the time - the didn't have any housing for this camera) , I bumped into "Meikon" housing , and boy - I was excited .

A nice housing for 200$ (inc. shipping to Israel) , which has an option to add a"fisheye" lens , has an alarm which goes on it touches water (beeps and has a red light), and considering that I have the diamond international MACK insurance for the next 3 years - that was a good bargain for me.

So I bought it , I bought it with the fisheye lens and I bought a red filter too.

Of course , when the package arrived ,I drove to the Red Sea in Eilat (Israel) , and tested it. Need to say that I have no experience in underwater photography , but the Images I got were brilliant ! I was so happy with the results ! After some time I got more and more familiar with the camera abilities and functionalities , and my underwater photography skills got also improved - which result an even much better photos.

I have to say , it is still great bargain for this case , but everyone should know the downside of a cheap housing -

1. The housing is made from polycarbonate , and it floats , I mean - really floats . If you by mistake lost the grip of it in 30m deep dive - you can probably can say goodbye to the camera (you are not allowed to swim fast up when diving for deep dives without decompression). another problem with it is that not really helps with the buoyancy.

2. The "Fisheye" lens - cost me 220$ ,terrible thing to buy. The housing have 67mm thread port , which means that you can attach to it anything that has 67mm screw - such as lenses and filters. the problem is that the lens's screw quality is really poor. I tried few times using it but it just dont screw to the housing at all , or when it does screw (with a lot of hard work and pressure) , you will be struggling to release and unscrew it . Although it does take really nice picture , the screw quality makes the whole experience very poor, and the image quality is not the best that you can get from a "fisheye" lens . My recommendation - try other 67,, lenses , ot use for the whole dive the Sony fisheye lens (there is one that actually fits this housing).

3. The flash - if you want to use a flash (strobe) underwater , you should know there are two problems with this housing . Like many housings out there , this one also uses TTL slave - which means that in order to fire the strobe you need the build-in camera's flash to fire and then the light will travel through an optic cable that connected to the housing on the one side and to the strobe and in the other side , which will make the strobe to fire as will. there are two manufacturing problems with that - first , when firing with the built in flash , there is a little circle that appears on the image . this is caused because there is no good isolation inside the housing between the flash and the lens , so the built-in flash also illuminates inside the housing and at the end reaching the lens - and appears on the picture ( I will attach a photo for example) . in order to solve that - I just used a paper business card and put it in the rubber inside the housing , which is wrapping the lens , in the top part of it , and then the problem was solved. the other problem - which I think is more problematic - is that they didn't build a good place for the build in camera's flash , so it doesn't pop up well ( I'll attach a photo of that too) , and by well , I mean it just bending wrong , and if it doesn't bend the "correct" way - the light will not travel in the optic cable - which result of no flash firing. I also got a "work around" for this problem - just open the flash before closing the housing , put the tip of the flash on the tip of the housing , and then close it. that way it will work.

All problems I described , I got confirmation for them , from the Meikon manufacturer , and they agreed that those are problems - but there is nothing to do with it. So if you want to buy one - consider those problems.

My suggestion - Today almost all big manufacturer have a housing for this camera , some of them in really descent price (~1000$ for the Ikelite housing) , which will probably will get you a better quality of everything .

Hope it helped someone out there ...

cheers,

Eitan