Sy,
You're always going to have to worry about flooding - goes with the territory. I also suggest the
Seatools housings, they're really lightweight. And seem molded around the camera. A little pricey though. Another similar option (same mfr?) is the Zillion line, sold by Aiko Trading - I'd link to the Zillion site but it's in Japanese.
Aiko Trading - Zillion Housings
In housings, the more $$ you spend the more redundancy in things like dual o-rings, better sealing methods as well as better optics. The more custom the housing, typically the less ballast weight you'll have to use to offset the bouyancy of the air in the housing. Some of the better metal housings - Amphibico, Gates, Light & Motion are almost neutral in the water without any. The generic camera "tube" models, while less expensive, need more ballast. Some allow you to use diveweights onsite, others (Ikelite) have their own removable weight that you bring along.
Since you're looking for now fuss shooting, I'd go with an electronic housing. Since most put the controls on a handgrip for ease of use. I have one and shoot completely with my right hand. fwiw, I have an
Amphibico. Mechanical housings locate their controls near the camera controls so there's more to do while filming.
Since you don't want to mess with editing, you might consider one of the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) cameras - the new ones allow you to capture from 10-40 hours of video depending on what quality setting you use. If you have an HDTV, all the new ones have an HDMI port so you can hook it up directly for HiDef playback.
Of course you'll have to transfer footage to a computer or other storage device once you fill up the camera storage. But you can do in-camera editing/deleting also. If you don't want to do that, tape is an option. Or the removable "flash" media models, but consider the cost of additional media when pricing them.
Sony and Canon both sell a portable DVD burner for around $2-300, used to transfer the contents of your camera directly to DVD. But even the least expensive HDD cameras have 40-60GB drives, at 4.7GB, that's a lot of DVD's...lol. If someone's selling a portable Blu-Ray burner, I haven't seen it yet.
