shellicam or similar

[rjdm]

Hello,

I'm an avid diver but only dive maybe 15-20 days per year. I've been thinking about getting into video but have been reluctant due to the cost and effort needed to maintain the gear and not have floods. I've seen many many folks have their cameras flooded due to a myriad of reasons. What housing is rock solid with the minimum of care? I hate having to worry about o rings and the shellicam sounded interesting. I'm not looking for professional quality.

 

[Mr.X]

Hello,

I'm an avid diver but only dive maybe 15-20 days per year. I've been thinking about getting into video but have been reluctant due to the cost and effort needed to maintain the gear and not have floods. I've seen many many folks have their cameras flooded due to a myriad of reasons. What housing is rock solid with the minimum of care? I hate having to worry about o rings and the shellicam sounded interesting. I'm not looking for professional quality.

Any housing is prone to a leak. I have not had one ever in a video housing. This is over 20 years of using these things. It's all a matter of preparation making sure that seals fit and rings are clean of debris, excess grease. The only time I've seen a catastrophic failure is when seals were extruded, or bayonets fittings misaligned.

The Shellicam looks interesting for a flat port housing. Another inexpensive alternative is to use the video function on a digital camera in an inexpensive acrylic housing.

X

 

[diversteve]

Hello,

I'm an avid diver but only dive maybe 15-20 days per year. I've been thinking about getting into video but have been reluctant due to the cost and effort needed to maintain the gear and not have floods. I've seen many many folks have their cameras flooded due to a myriad of reasons. What housing is rock solid with the minimum of care?

Gates, Amphibico, Light & Motion...Ikelite, Aquavideo, USVH also.

Define "minimum of care"

I hate having to worry about o rings and the shellicam sounded interesting.

You'll still have to worry about it with their rubber seal. Maybe less due to it's apparent thickness. But since every other housing manufacturer uses o-rings who is right? My guess is long-term durability and hardening after exposure to salt water and the elements is the issue with rubber seals. Ikelite otoh has been using o-rings for 45 years.
your call...

Also "boiling for an hour" and "strapped under a Jeep" while indicative of robustness, probably has no bearing on whether it will leak at depth.

I'm not looking for professional quality.

You won't get it with Shellicam. No camera control, the complete inability to even see/frame what you're shooting and lack of basic start/stop, zoom or focus control means you're getting what you pay for. To be fair, that's the problem with other generic "tube" housings also.

Although at that price, their only competition is the Nemo sold on eBay. Advantage to Nemo is that it has a clear back port so you can see your viewfinder or maybe LCD screen - depending on camcorder size. Disadvantage to Nemo is it's lower depth rating (120').

If you want a basic tube housing with some controls, also look at Aquatix or Atmo-Seal. Double the price plus. If money's not as big a factor, you can get an Ocean Images Dolphin, TopDawg or Ikelite for around $900, all have controls and viewports.

Links to all of the housing mfr's websites named are here.

 

[dittohead]

We used to have o-rings, and they are great. Just slightly more prone to the potential for leakage. Since the flat rubber seal is made of the same material as the o-ring, longevity should be the same. The main advantage to o-rings is cost. We tried for a long time to design the leak potential out of the o-ring seals to no avail. I would love to save 2-3 bucks per housing by going to an o-ring seal, but I could not do that and maintain the reliability. I am also a certified water specialist, and a L.A. county Boiler operater. Keeping water in and out of stuff has been my job for 20 years. We are not looking for deep water testers at all,we just want real video of people at a dive depth deeper than I am willing to go. We have tested them way beyond 500', which is silly of course, but also a testament to it's design. The back view port was ditched a couple years ago since we found it to be nearly useless. Unless it is designed like the pro units the rear lens only adds the potential for leaks, scratch damage, and cost. We also found that with the rounded rear end, entering the water with the "giant step" technique we no longer had that "skip" in the filming from the harsh entry. And drop testing off of 50 foot cliffs made for a nicer water entry. Another fun test we are hoping to do in a few days will be the sling shot test. We plan on launching a running camera from the beach as far as it will go. If your funds allow, absolutely go with the ikelite, anphibico etc. They are beautiful units, and top notch quality. During our testing for the past several years, we have use dall of them. I just listed my old sony spk-tr1 housing on ebay. We were doing some early spring cleaning and found it in a box from our early testing and design work. If you look at the videos on our website, these are all shot with our housing and edited with adobe premeire elements 2.0. Our unit is meant for the noob videographer who is on a tight budget. It was not designed for The Discovery Channel. If you are even slightly competent with a computer the video editing is a breeze. Even color correction brightness, contrast are all done on the fly post now. MWB, zooming, start stop, etc, are all nice features that add cost, complexity, and they also make for potentially better video footage. If you want pretty good footage, and are compfortable editing video, which you need to do with any system regardless, and want to spend very little money... I would also recommend keeping an eye out on ebay for the high end units. You can often find them in good shape at great prices there. Just check compatability carefully or you will end up reselling it.

 

[diversteve]

We are not looking for deep water testers at all,we just want real video of people at a dive depth deeper than I am willing to go.

Sorry, I misread that. I corrected my remarks in the previous post.

The back view port was ditched a couple years ago since we found it to be nearly useless. Unless it is designed like the pro units the rear lens only adds the potential for leaks, scratch damage, and cost.

Why? If it's engineered like your front port, I don't see the downside since your housing looks to be so robust.

And I have to politely disagree with it being nearly useless, you need to be able to shoot properly framed and at least somewhat correctly lit footage to be able to fix it in post. Some people have no ability to pre-visualize what they're shooting also. A buddy once used an old housing I had via the point/shoot method. So I've got 10mins. of 2/3rd's of a pair of Angelfish and about 5mins. of the coral reef right above where some turtles were resting. Never be able to fix that in editing...

And I would have missed shots of timid Seahorses and Spotted Eels without the controls to zoom through my port. Even then I had to slowly get close. Not to mention some deepwater Eagle Ray shots off a wall that would've been tiny without straying over the 4000' drop...

We also found that with the rounded rear end, entering the water with the "giant step" technique we no longer had that "skip" in the filming from the harsh entry.

I don't either since my housings have had the ability to be turned on once in the water. Don't take this personally but your solution fixes a problem that only your housing has.

btw, I'm getting ready to update the housings list here so I'l be certain to include Shellicam.com. Given it's limitations it appears to be a very usable, durable product.

 

[dittohead]

Thanks. I totally agree with you. My housing has definite limitations, but for those who want a fun, inexpensive, soon to be determined bulletproof housing, I have spent many years designing this unit to meet those needs. The shotgun method, while rough, is perfect for most who are not worried about he possibility of missing that once in a lifetime shot. I lost footage of a blue shark a month ago, but... I guess I have to go back out and look for some more. I was out doing depth tests on our last revision of the lens design, and I was videoing some blue whales on the surface when we caught a blue shark. In my panic, I put the camera in the casing without zooming it back in. I didnt have my wetsuit so going in the water was not in my best interest. I stuffed the camera in the housing and stuck it under the water. The shark swam by, broke the line before we could extract the hook, and disappeared. When I got home all I saw was a blur. Oops, but even so, my technique was the cause of the failure. So now I am looking for a couple of shark dives locally. Another reason for ditching the rear lens was the "tube" design allows a lot of stray light in through the rear lens. This is not the case with the high end units that have viewports set up in the exact correct position, or that have lcd screen on the backside. This stray light tends to have the potential of causing glare on the front lens reflecting into the camera lens. We noticed this while editing some of our older footage. It took us a while to realize what it was. I painted one of the rear lenses to see if this would correct it. Almost 100% gone, the we painted the inside with a very flat black paint, and vioila. The quality footage potential was near the high end housings. The real units allow virtually no stray light in, we have designed ours to simulate that as close as possible without the cost of customizing the unit for each camcorders different dimensions. We have spent the largest portion of the past year on the aesthetics of the unit, and keeping cost to a minimum through extensive simple tooling. We have only recently decided that the unit was worth marketing. I was not even going to consider it unless I could get the unit to retail for under $200.00, meaning the lds could actually stock and sell them, and most importantly, make money.