A while ago, I wrote this post - https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4135122- now I'm coming back with results
I ended up purchasing the following:
- Sony A6300 with kit lens - $837.15 used off ebay
- Extra battery, charger, 64GB microSD card, small hard bag - total $146.81 from B&H
- SeaFrogs housing - $253 from Aliexpress
- Meikon wet dome - $99 from Aliexpress
- Tray with two arms and four butterfly clamps - $137.25 from Aliexpress
- Camera lanyard - $6.49 from Aliexpress
- Lens lanyard - $4.27 from Aliexpress
- 67mm magnetic adapter - $52.85 from DiverVision
- Two Archon D36V lights - $234.64 each from Aliexpress
- Eight 18650 cells (LG HG2, though I suspect they are decent fakes) - NIS 640 (about $183, or $22.85 per cell) from a local store - wild overcharging, but I needed the batteries for the upcoming trip, and the ones I ordered from China at quarter of the cost still haven't arrived.
- Two carbon fiber 8"/60mm 300g float arms - $36 each from Aliexpress
- Two extra clamps - $7.32 each from Aliexpress
- Nitecore i8 charger - $39.51 from Fasttech
- Acrylic scratch polishing kit - $21.50 from Aliexpress
Also got a SEL18200LE lens for general purpose use while traveling, short 3mm wetsuit, mask, snorkel and fins, which is not particularly relevant, except insofar that I sought white-colored fins with the aim of using them to set camera white balance in lieu of a slate.
While I was initially aiming at a $1000 budget, I ended up spending more than twice that - while the bare camera + housing came in mostly within budget, all the accessories blew it up right quick. Oh well - I got a nice bonus this summer, this was as good a way as any to spend it.
With the Israeli autumn holidays wrapping up, I took advantage of a long weekend to go down to Eilat and put this pile of gear into water, doing thirteen dives over four days. I have very little basis for comparison, but here are my impressions, in no particular order.
The housing is well-built and almost all of the controls are accessible. The only function that is not accessible is closing the pop-up flash - once you press the button that releases it, the flash will stay up, and there is no built-in way to disable it from firing. Unfortunately, even with the little plastic diffuser, the flash does little more than cast a shadow from the lens barrel. I suppose it might be more useful when shooting small critters from really up close, perhaps with Sony's 30mm macro lens and/or a diopter rather than my wet dome, but diving with a group, I didn't have any opportunities to take at least a few minutes to slowly sneak up on an unsuspecting target and put this theory to the test.
Oddly, the four-way buttons on the rear wheel tend to misbehave in air or very shallow water - the right button usually presses the top of the wheel - but at any depth worth mentioning (at least a meter or two), they all worked flawlessly. I took the rig down to my rated depth of 30 meters and none of the buttons exhibited any signs of sticking or, for that matter, leaking.
The mode knob on top of the housing is marked identically to the mode dial, but in practice this is useless - inside the housing, the little wheels attached to the knobs contact the two top dials edge-to-edge and therefore turn them in the opposite direction, so the markings would need to be in reverse order to have a chance of being relevant. Fortunately, the housing is translucent, and the markings on the mode dial inside are clearly visible.
Initially I thought the camera screen was impossible to use in sunlight, but then I found the 'Bright Sunlight' option in the menus - once activated, this made it moderately usable while snorkeling and completely legible with a meter or more of water above it.
EVF face sensor is triggered by the housing door, so camera must be set to 'Monitor (manual)' for the screen to work. If the EVF is on, it's kind of visible if I pressed the mask right against the housing, but this is by no means practical - the eye is too far away and the field of view covers only a portion of the EVF from any single angle.
Shooting bursts in Hi+ mode (more on that later) without flash, the camera battery lasted for about three dives with 400-600 images taken per dive. The lights result varied - one set of four batteries is definitely better than the other, lasting almost two hours to the other set's one hour in a bucket test. Having only eight 18650 cells, I conserved them, turning the lights on only when approaching a subject and turning them off afterwards, and even the 'bad' set lasted me through a day of four dives.
Autofocus is very fast and mostly accurate, with no perceptible shutter lag whatsoever. Diving with a guided group of non-photographers (at most, the other members of the group carried GoPros), I had hardly any time to set up a shot of a subject I wanted, so I mostly shot medium-long bursts while slowly swimming past a subject and trying to keep it in the frame. This produced a mountain of junk and a few somewhat usable shots - so far I've culled some five thousand images I brought back to about a hundred. Better results were obtained by hanging at the tail of the group, sticking around to take a shot after they've all taken a look at whatever critter that was identified by the divemaster, then catching up, but this was not always possible.
Swimming past a coral reef
Sea star
At first I shot in aperture priority, but even wide open at f/3.5, to say nothing of smaller apertures, this had a tendency to produce overly long exposure times, resulting in smeared shots. After a while, I switched to shutter priority and set it to 1/1000, but this mostly favored wider apertures, which were not always optimal. On my last day, I put the camera in manual mode with 1/1000 shutter, auto ISO and varying aperture and this seemed to generate positive results.
For focusing, I used AF-C almost the entire time, with focus area set mostly to 'wide', switching to 'center' if I saw that the camera was trying to track the wrong thing and I had the time and free attention to change the setting. Motion blur at longer exposures aside, it had no trouble maintaining focus while tracking moving fish from a moving camera.
The lights were moderately useful during daylight at shallow depth - I could see coral colors start to develop while approaching with the lights on from maybe a meter and a half, and totally change from less than a meter. Deeper down, the effect was more pronounced. For example, this parrotfish was encountered at about 20 meters:
Parrotfish, Satil wreck, Eilat
At night, the effect was dramatic - we had a group of four plus the divemaster, and he had us keep the flashlights off except when approaching one reef or another, and every now and then, dim narrow beams from shop-issued lights would start sweeping around, then I'd press a button and the entire reef just lit up.
Lionfish on the prowl at night - shadows from both lights are visible on the sand:
Lionfish, Moses Rock, Eilat
I tried, several times, to set manual white balance while underwater, on find or on sand, but every time the camera just gave me a white balance error. I was planning to try taking occasional snaps of the fins as a white balance reference point, but every time I went into water, it totally slipped my mind, and in any case, this turned out to be mostly unnecessary as it isn't difficult to find a reference patch of grey in most shots, and I shot all the stills in RAW, processing them with the free version of Capture One Express for Sony.
Some subjects were more difficult than others to get a good focus on - I guess the natural camouflage was effective at confusing the camera.
Scorpionfish (I think), Moses Rock, Eilat
With focus area set to 'wide', it kept locking on to corals surrounding this crocodilefish.
Crocodilefish, Japanese Gardens, Eilat
Total right weight out of water is about 4.8 kilograms or 10.5 pounds. In the water, it's somewhat negative - not at all difficult to hold, but it starts sinking immediately if released. Before my next trip, I'm going to change the 8"/300g float arms to the 10"/400g model; hopefully this will bring it closer to neutral.
The magnetic adapter makes attaching and detaching the wet lens absolutely trivial, and holds it fairly securely. The Meikon wet dome is quite buoyant and will float away quickly if detached and untethered - I drilled a hole in one of the hood petals, tied a loop of string through it, and used a lanyard to attach it to the tray.
The double-ended spring lanyard was a satisfactory way of keeping the camera securely attached to the BCD while maintaining freedom of motion. The center buckle, when engaged, shortened it sufficiently to allow me to keep my hands free of the camera, in or out of the water.
The acrylic dome is super easy to scratch - I damn near destroyed it a couple times. Spent about half an hour trying to grind away the scratches with sandpaper, then polishing it with coarse then fine cloth, and got most of them out, but not all. The scratches don't seem to be showing up in photos, but they're very visible in some of the few video clips that I took. The dome is also quite prone to flaring.
I didn't order the $11 dome cover from Meikon - serves me right, now I'll have to buy the $75 replacement hemisphere. Once I have those, I'm not going to take the cover off the dome until I'm in the water and ready to shoot.
The four clamps I got bundled with the tray were fine, but the two I bought separately are utter junk - they started rusting immediately upon contact with saltwater, scratched the hell off the 1" balls they attached to, and to top things off, on land, they couldn't hold the weight of the Archon lights without moving.
Coming back to the lights, I gave the UV mode a couple tries on the night dive, but without a yellow filter, I couldn't find anything to visibly fluoresce - maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough.
I don't have a way to test their actual output, but I did do a crude dimming test - I charged the batteries, put them in the lights, placed one of them on a chair 1 meter away from a white wall, turned it on, placed the camera next to it, set it to manual with aperture wide open and started increasing exposure until auto ISO went to 200 (couldn't get it to 100 at any exposure value) - this happened at 1/400. With both lights together, the same was achieved at 1/640. Following this, I left both lights for an hour at full power in a bucket of water - after that hour, the 'bad' set of batteries was almost depleted (it started flashing, indicating less than 10% remaining), and the same camera test achieved ISO 200 at 1/250, but the light with the 'good' set of batteries still hit ISO 200 at 1/400, indicating no significant dimming after an hour of constant operation, and starting to lose output only when the batteries are almost exhausted.
The batteries I got are flat-top cells, and a couple times, one of the lights didn't turn on until given a knock - I suspect the flat tops don't engage the contact in the light head with perfect reliability. I specifically ordered button top cells from China to avoid this issue, but only flat tops were available locally. I'm thinking about putting a drop of solder on top of each cell to make a protrusion for reliable contact.
Light controls are easy enough to operate - right button cycles through high -> medium -> low power white, left button cycles through red -> blue -> purple/UV. At first I kept fumbling between them, especially as I was experimenting with different light positions, facing up, down, sideways, but after a couple dives it became automatic. There is no flashing mode except the signal that the battery is almost dry.
The eight-bay charger ended up having one defective slot - it starts charging a battery, but turns off after a couple minutes. Fasttech offered to refund me $8 while keeping the charger as-is, but I have little use for an 8-bay charger that is effectively a 4-bay one, so I opted for sending it back to them for exchange.
Can't think of anything else right now - if anyone has any questions, I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.
