Fantasea A6500 Housing

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Grumply

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Messages
25
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Location
Melbourne
# of dives
100 - 199
Well it appears Santa knows I've been good, for goodness' sake this year. Because all this just arrived:

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**Soup can for size reference, this whole rig (sans strobes) only weighs 3.9kg!

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It's the Fantasea A6500 Housing, with Sony 10-18mm, 50mm Macro, and 20mm + Fisheye Converter.

Tray and handles are the Sealife Flex Connect system, which I love in theory, but am a bit worried about in practice - I'm not sure how well they'll handle full-sized strobes. I was told they'll be fine, but I'd love to hear from anyone who's used them with proper strobes before. I'm wondering whether (even if they can't hold the strobes up on-land) they'll fare alright underwater where the strobes are more neutrally buoyant?

I'm particularly excited about the size and weight of the setup, it really is quite tiny compared to a regular DSLR housing. Only 3.9kg as setup in this photo.

If anyone else is currently shooting with the Fantasea setup, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Any tips on how to get the best from it, or issues to look out for would be much appreciated.

Cheers
 
Congrats! I have read some great things about the Sony A6500 and FantaSea housing. (I got an A6000 and a Nauticam housing just before the A6500 was released. If only I had known.)

I would strongly recommend that you get a vacuum valve. (I know from another thread that you had concerns about compatibility. Now that you have your housing are you able to sort that out?)

Just out of curiosity, what strobes do you plan on using?
 
Thanks Hoag,

Yep, I have the Leak Sentinel v5 on the way.

The issue was that the M16 ports on the first production run of the Fantasea housing are not actually compatible with "Nauticam' threaded M16 accessories. Fantasea have since corrected this, and every housing from serial number: 0187617 onwards will be fine with Nauticam M16 accessories, but for all of the earlier models (of which my brand new unit is unfortunately one) Fantasea have built an adapter that will make them compatible. And they'll send them out to whoever needs them (mine is on the way now). They've been fast and thorough with getting that sorted out for me, so I'm impressed with the customer service so far.

Getting all of the camera kit and the underwater kit in one hit has cleaned me out completely, so for the time being I'll be borrowing a spare set of strobes from my dad. He has pairs of both the Inon Z240s and the Ikelite DS161s, both of which are great. The DS161s are enormous though (about 1.2kg each I think), and I have serious doubts that the Sealife Flex Connect arms will be able to hold them. Figuring out which ones I can get away with, will be the first thing to test when I can get the camera in the water.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/

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