Sony v. Oly?

[mattiedread]

I'm going digital, and want 4 megs resolution or better. I know very little about cameras (optical physics yes, reality, no).

I've read a bunch of threads and visited mutliple web sites. I'm tempted to go w/ a high end Sony, but Olys seem to be twice as popular in one of the polls here. Can anyone give me advantages/disadvantages? Keep in mind, I'm no Ansel Adams.

One other point, I read on this board that there is shutter lag, with the exception of of 'SLR's... what does that mean? I don't want to push a button and wait .25s for the image to capture.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[GP]

I have a Sony P5 and MPK Marine Pack and am happy with the rig although it's only 3.2 MP. The new Sony P9 is 4 MP and only $599 which is a great deal. I only paid $168 for my Marine Pack from an online computer supply store and I'm sure the Marine Pack for the P9 could be had for roughly the same price.
The Olympus cameras are very nice and even more popular than the Sony's but they also cost more too and so do the Olympus housings which put Olympus out of my budget range. The Sony's use a special rechargeable battery pack which is nice because it allows the camera to be more compact but it's not as convenient to not be able to use off the rack batteries so there is a trade off there. Also, the camera only comes with one battery pack and I ended up buying an extra one for $60 which is over priced IMO but necessary if you're out diving and aren't near an electrical outlet to recharge it. The Olympus cameras can use standard AA batteries or rechargeable equivalents which is a nice feature and more convenient for trips.

 

[clive francis]

Hi,

I started with an Oly C920 Zoom and although only 1 meg, on a normal size photo you couldn't tell the difference between them and a 35mm shot, because I had some developed on a proper machine.

I now have the Oly 3040 (3.34 meg) and would never go back to a 35mm!

check my site for an eaxmple of topside photo's taken both during the night and day.

The Cxx40 series have all been voted best in their class due to the lens, which is extremely bright (see my site for night shots) so it should work really well on night dives!!

I bought my camera brand new for £350 and the dive case for £220, £140 for 2 128 meg cards, plus the ones I had from previous camera.

check out price of acessories with the sony, plus if you have to get it repaired, sony are complete gits and you have to pay for diagnose even when you may know what is wrong (thats what they wanted to do for my cd auto changer!)

 

[jrtonkin]

For some very indepth reviews of digital cameras, try the sites:

http://www.dpreview.com
http://www.imaging-resource.com

These sites both only talk about the optical/photographic sides of the cameras though, they don't go into any special UW-related issues. However, they will probably tell you more than you want to know about the land-side operation of any of the cameras they review.

As for shutter-lag... (Note, I'm not a photography pro, this is just my understanding of it)

All cameras have some lag between when you press the shutter-release and when the exposure begins.

For SLRs (film or digital) there's the lag while the mirror moves out of the optical path.

There will also be a mechanical lag on any camera while the aperature stops-down to the selected f-stop before the shutter opens. Except in a few models in which the same iris is used as both aperature and shutter.

For a camera with autofocus there are two modes it can be shooting in, focus-priority and release-priority. In focus-priority, there will be a lag after the shutter release is pressed while the camera does it's autofocus trick. In release-priority this lag is avoided by simply taking the picture as soon as possible, and hoping that the focus system is "close enough". Not all cameras will let you pick which mode they operate in though.

For a camera with autoexposure, there will also be a lag while the metering system figures out either the correct aperature or shutter-speed or both. Of course if you can put the camera into full manual (user-specified aperature and shutter-speed) this can be mostly avoided.

If you're using a strobe that has a pre-flash for
setting exposure that's another source of delay: first the flash fires once, the light-meter sees that image, and calculates the correct exposure, then the flash fires a second time, this time with the shutter open to actually make the exposure.

And of course, all these lags overlap each other to various degrees, so they don't just add linearly.

In general the less the camera has to think about how to correctly focus and expose the image, the shorter the lag.

At least, that's how I understand things. I could be horribly wrong though, so check with your LPS-staff if it's a really important issue to you.

Jamie

 

[Zept]

With digital cameras, lag time is also caused by the camera readying the CCD (the chip that captures the image). Lag times can be significant, but they vary considerably, depending on the make/model of the camera. In-depth reviews usually make some comment about the lag time... I'm pretty sure Phil Askey at DPReview covers it (see jrtonkin's post for the Web address).

Zept

 

[mattiedread]

Some great advice and great sites, I have my homework cut out for me.

Clive, what boat did you take the to the Similans? Ironically I have a very similar sunset photo taken between the same two islands. Took Harmony (White&Blue) on both my trips there.