BootsnAll Travel Community

Do you have a waterproof digital camera?

How do you like? How waterproof is it?

no, but I have a waterproof housing for my canon digital camera. It's a bit pricy (about $250 retail but $125 on eBay) but I love it. It makes it bulky but for SCUBA diving it's great!

quote:

Originally posted by gymboy689:
no, but I have a waterproof housing for my canon digital camera. It's a bit pricy (about $250 retail but $125 on eBay) but I love it. It makes it bulky but for SCUBA diving it's great!

Which housing/camera is it?

It's a Canon PowerShot a80 with the Canon WP-DC900 housing

I have Olympus 720SW. Great point and shoot unit, with plenty of handy settings.
It's waterproof to 3 metres. I dont mind taking it in fresh water but knowing how corisive and abrasive sandy salt is I cant bring myself to take out in the surf though.

MH

I have a Pentax Optio WP and like it so much that I bought the same model after it was nicked. It's a great little point-and-shoot, but only waterproof to about 1.5m (so take care when snorkelling!). The good thing is that I don't have to worry about rain and humidity.

And you can take nice pictures with it:


But if you plan to go diving, a proper waterproof housing is the best option.

I have a housing for my canon powershot A75, and its sweet!! Works super well I have taken it down to 115ft plus without a problem. I love it.

At some point I am gonna get a strobe for it, but at the moment it takes pretty good picks, below is one of my favs from the Channel Islands in CA:



Trekker

I have a Canon SD450 with the AW-DC50 All-Weather case. I love it, and I've taken a lot of great pictures underwater with it, especially on the Great Barrier Reef and on some shipwrecks in South East Queensland. I got the camera with the case rather than one of the new waterproofs because I really wanted a Canon, and they currently do not have any waterproof models (that I know of).

Even at $115, I think it was a great buy and I certainly took much clearer pictures (and plenty of movies!) with it. The only two problems I have had are 1) it is an all-weather case, and therefore only waterproof down to 10 feet. This is good for rain and snorkeling, but when I get my scuba license I would like to have one that can go much further down, but unfortunately they don't make actual scuba cases for the SD450. Newer models like the SD600 have scuba cases though. Problem number 2 is that my O-ring (the waterproof seal) has already worn out, and I've had the case for 9 months, and have used it 5 or 6 times in those 9 months. I took the proper precautions--greased it with silcon gel, made sure not to stretch it each time, cleaned it thoroughly afterwards--yet on the trip I took last week, it was so stretched that it would not properly seal anymore, and on testing it without the camera inside in the water, it let small amounts of water in that would have been enough to adversely effect my camera. So, I guess the moral is, always have a spare O-ring!

Here's a picture I've taken with this camera/case combo:

wow! Those are some awesome pictures. I'd love to see more.

Here's a couple links to underwater pictures I have taken:

Snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef
Snorkeling on the Tangalooma Shipwrecks

Just go to my link under my name and then click on the diving section, that has all the photos taken with my camera.

I have started being a volunteer diver at the Newport Aquarium in Oregon and hope to get some good shots soon.

Trekker

I use the Canon S70 with the canon underwater housing. I also have a Nikon DSLR but the housing for the DSLR was more expensive than the camera so I went with the Canon point and shoot for underwater. It has also worked well as an extra camera for when I don't want to lug around the SLR on day trips or around town. The underwater pics come out beautiful and it’s nice to have the video as an added feature which the DSLR wouldn’t be able to do. The S70 is 7 megapixel that has a 28-100mm film equivalent lens which is wide angle and hard to find in point and shoots. That is important because everything is magnified underwater so you need that wide angle to fit more into the pic. I don't think you can buy this new anymore but you might be able to find one on ebay or something similar. Here is the review from Dpreview.com if you are interested in more specs.
S70 review

my 2 cents....
If you can, buy a waterproof camera. I should have. Today while climbing Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand, I asked someone to take me picture, and he dropped my camera in some water....Of course he did not offer to pay for it...

Any of you divers out there know if you can rent underwater cameras? I'm not looking for a professional camera just something better than the disposables and preferably digital.

I ask because I am going to the Galapagos in November. My camera is a Canon S2 IS and they only made a case for the S1. If renting isn't an option I will have to start looking for other options such as those linked in the first post.