Underwater camera setup

Hi Safaribob,

#2.: Simple stills oriented camera for snorkeling (even good for scubadiving) is Olympus TG-5 or 6. Great for macro, but also WA with wetlens.

I can consider this as an alternative to action camera. My skepticism is that it is also a 1/2.5" sensor. And they seem to cost around 300 usd used, + an underwater housing if I want to dive with it.

=> Clearly better cameras exist. If you look at reviews (e.g. the one from Backscatter that I linked), it is astonishing how good UW photos taken with TGs can be when the photographer is experienced. I believe this is a very good entry into UW-photography and after some personal experience you yourself know best what fits to you. In case you want more than snorkeling, you need at least one good flash too...

not entirely convinced that tg is better than iPhone in a hard case, apart from better controls, but I am leaning towards it being an overall compelling package, unless GoPros software, stabilization and auto editing is somehow useful. I guess that’s why people say GoPro for video.

=> I am not able to say anything concerning I-phone UW, I very seldom take a photo with my handy, even over the water. I doubt, however, that you can make macro and supermacro with an I-phone, the TGs can do this already without further modifications (check carefully before going this route, whether such add on optics is available for UW for the I-phone). In addition very good wet lenses (add-on lenses) for WA exist for TGs (also here check whether you can make WA with I-phone). TGs deliver raw files, very important for post-processing (no idea what format an I-phone delivers). A draw-back of TGs is they do not have manual mode (= very essential mode for UW), but UW-photographers share tricks how they can set the camera what to do...

(For me personally, the small sensor, the inability to change lenses and the lack of manual mode is the dealbreaker for TG, I never owned one)

Let's say the budget is 1000, how is it best spent?

=>

For 1000 bucks you get #1 or #2 with some acessoirs. Even when buying second hand (a good option), the budget is too low to get a complete rig that fulfills your ambitous desire. Housing your Sony A7Riv (I see from your gear list that you have one) in a cheap plastic housing is a good way to get rid of it by flooding and to be ready then to buy the A1.

you think the seafrogs are that bad?

=> It is up to everybody how think about such housings and good if someone is happy with them - I certainly do not want to hurt someone's feelings here, it is just how I personally think. Fact is that my wife had a similar housing for her Olympus EPL5 (the original Olympus housing, now AOI), which she succeeded to flood - total loss of camera and lens. Minimum requirement for me would be a vaccum system for safety (maybe available for Seafrog). In addition, there are several other reasons why I prefer Aluminium housings (in my case Nauticam) housings:

1. When you ever had a Nauticam housing in your hands and you feel all buttons and levers are organically at your fingertips (e.g. "dhumbfocus lever"), you never will want to go back.

2. Nauticam has a large collection of ports/domports and UW optics, like WAPC, WWL1, CMCs, SMCs etc. ... . I am not sure wich ones could be used with potential adapters on plastic housings. IF it would be possible (probably not) and you would build up an entire system based on plastic, it is like building your house on sand. Some manufactureres build their own domeports, but I have read here that e.g. the Meikon domeports are optically drash. What is the point of using such a domeport together with the latest FF camera model?

3. Already in the mid-term time range the alu housings are more economically. They represent an entire system (comparable to a lens mount of camera companies) and when you update to a new camera model, you just acquire the camera plus pure housing. The rest of the system stays the same (domes/domeports/extensions/wetlenses). When Olympus made the plastic housings for their cameras, they managed to create three different port mounting standards, so it was depending on luck, whether one could continue to use ports when changing the camera model. I am not sure how upgradeable third party housings and ports are in this respect, but I am reluctant to make an investment there...

Wolfgang