Narrowed it down to these 3 cameras

[DesertEagle]

Be careful. The Canon housing for the A640 and A710 have rectangular ports. They're good for a little macro and head&shoulder portraits. Forget about reef scenics. You won't be able to use wide angle or macro lenses with them. You would be better off with either:

Canon A630/A640 and an Ikelite housing. It uses 67mm lenses.

Canon A540 (6MP) 2AA batteries. The Canon housing for the A540 can take Inon lenses.

The C-7070 is old by today's standards. Yes it went to F11, but that was one of a very few advantages it offered. If you want a really nice outfit, look at the new Canon G7. Ike will have a housing that will use a regular strobe cord.

I don't see much use for image stabalization underwater. Either you use a flash which will stop motion, or you shoot available light. For available light, high ISO performance would be much more valuable to get a higher shutter speed. It's the shutter speed, not camera shake that would make the difference.

 

[jeraldjcook]

If you want a really nice outfit, look at the new Canon G7. Ike will have a housing that will use a regular strobe cord.

I almost went this route with the G6, but the housing cost (something like $650) almost twice as much at the camera. And of course, since it had TTL, I would have wanted to spend $1000 on strobes.

 

[Gilligan]

The A640 is my choice. The only other candidate is the Fuji E900 because it has RAW and the Canon does not. If RAW is not important to you then the A640 is top dog in my opinion.

As a previous post stated the Canon housing won't take add-on wet mount lenses. The Ike housing will and it's in the $300 price range + the adapter for the 67mm lenses.

Ike has a housing for both the A640 and E900 that has the adapter for 67mm lenses. Both cameras use AA bats.

Canon housing for compactness and no lens add-ons.
Ike housing a little bigger, lens add-on capabilities and parts forever.

 

[randini]

I'm a total novice to UW photo, but I've decided on the a710, but a couple of other factors came into play for me. I want a camera that is small enough to stick into a pocket and carry around on the surface, yet has all the functionality for UW. I chose the 710 over the 640 becasue it's it's about 30% smaller & has a 6x OZ over the 4x. Also, I heard that the the 640's pictures are somewhat noisier than the 710 because they both have the same sensor and teh 640 has more pixels.

BTW the LCD's on both are the same (2.5" 115,000 pixels), the 710 is 7megapixel, not 8 and the Image Stabilization is optical, not electronic.

 

[SuPrBuGmAn]

Oly C7070: expensive. full manual control but a tad user UN-friendly during initial testing.

I find the controls on the C-xxxx cameras to be very intuitive if you plan to use manual exposure controls. Aside from accessing the ISO speeds, everything is accessible from external buttons.

 

[skywalk]

thank you for all the responses so far. I have pretty much decided on the A640. Now, if an ikelite housing is available, i'll be getting that. Otherwise i'll stick to the regular canon housing till the ike can be found.