Olympus prosumer camera

hi folks !!

am looking to get a mid range Olympus camera and housing with Inon strobe and tray for wet lenses. would appreciate your suggestions / advice would be much appreciated.

am NOT looking for a professional setup and would also like to be able to photography a nudi as well as a whale shark on the same dive !! so suggestions of lenses would also be much welcome with total price range indication.

thanks in advance for the assistance. ciao for now.

venkat
barracuda diving india

Inon makes AD mount bases for their lenses for the Stylus 710, 720SW, 760 & 770SW. If you want an Oly, and those are your criteria, those would be some cameras to look at. Unfortunately, the only cameras in the Oly prosumer range that support manual settings necessary for really good underwater pictures are the SP series, and I don't think they'll support wet lenses, except for the SP-350 which is no longer produced.

Ditto for what Larry said. The SP cameras had the combination of manual controls, RAW capture and plenty of lens choices.

Do not get suckered into buying a superzoom camera. The long zooms require an optical compromise one way or the other. And the Inon lenses don't work with them.

I use an SP-310, the cheaper 7MP sibling of the SP-350. The resulting prints look very good.

thanks guys !!

been referred to the FujiF50fd. any comments ? seems too good from the reviews i just read !!

venkat

The Fuji F50fd is fully compatible with Inon's accessories. As long as you keep the ISO under 400, resulution will be spectacular.

I have a Fuji F31fd that I use as a backup. I prefer the F31 because it has a much bigger battery.

What the Fuji cameras do not have is full manual control. It will give you aperture or shutter priority. I generally select aperture priority. Then I use exposure compensation (+ or -). This is with either my Olympus or Fuji.

The other major difference is that the F31 and F50 have very basic flash settings. My Olympus SP-310 and Larry's SP-350 have two flash options. The first is a slave setting in which the camera only emits one flash (no preflash). You can control the output on a scale of 1-10. This is used to trigger a bigger strobe. The advantage is that it uses less battery power. The second is using the regular flash mode (with preflash) and the ability to have flash exposure control plus or minus two stops. The Fuji F50 probably doesn't do this either. If you get an Inon or Ikelite strobe, this isn't a problem, since those strobes allow you to add some manual compensation. You may want to ask Larry if his new YS-110 does that.

These are links to my two recent galleries.

First is taken with an Olympus SP-310, Sea & Sea wide angle lens, Heinrichs Weikamp DA2 adapter and a Sea & Sea YS-60 strobe. I kept the YS-60 on 1/2 or full power (no TTL was needed). When you click on the photos, you can see the exposure information. It will usually show aperture priority, -2/3 or something like that. I did use the slave flash setting, so it doesn't show flash used. Diving In Eilat/Red Sea Photo Gallery by Josh Krancer at pbase.com

The second gallery was my F31fd with a Magic Filter (no flash). I did not have a wide angle lens fitted to this camera, so the perspective alone is different.
fuji_f31_underwater Photo Gallery by Josh Krancer at pbase.com

You may wish to also look at the Canon A570is. They are inexpensive and have full manual control.

Lenses: I would start with the Inon AD-105 wide angle.

dear josh,

superb snaps. thanks for the info. how does the G9 compare against the Fuji setup you use ?

venkat

DesertEagle:

Do not get suckered into buying a superzoom camera. The long zooms require an optical compromise one way or the other. And the Inon lenses don't work with them.

Click to expand...

That's not entirely true, speaking about the SP550 or SP560.

It's correct that you can't use e.g. an Inon Closeup lense out of the box, but you can with an adapter (on the SP 550 or SP 560 in an Olympus Housing).

Is the 18x zoom of much use under water? Probably not. Does that make the camera unusable under water? Certainly not. Just because the zoom is available, doesn't mean you have to use it to its full extent or capabilities. The camera has a pretty good feature set, including usable wide angle as it is, full manual controls, and RAW shooting capabilities. Ofcourse it has disadvantages, but so does every other camera, and the "right" choice for you will depend on what you want to do with the camera. I don't want to convince you that the SP550/560/570 is the right camera for you, but I suggest you don't get suckered into discarding models from the list of options, based on superficial arguments. Do you homework, and have fun doing it. Read reviews, look at photos taken with the various models, try to get your hands on some of the options you are considering, and after all that - take your decision.