I just took my RX100 diving for a week with the new Ikelite housing and wanted to offer some feedback on my experience with the new housing. I was shooting mainly macro with a 67mm inon ucl-165 wet lens, ultralight tray/arms, and single sea & sea ys-d1 strobe. This is my first experience using an Ikelite housing.
- The housing is quite a bit larger and heavier than I expected for the compact size of the RX100. It looks to be closer in size to the housings for the larger cameras such as the panasonic lx5 and olympus xz-1. I knew this before ordering as all of the measurements are on the Ikelite website but having it in your hands makes all the difference. It appears that the rear dial control and height of the pop-up flash are the culprits for requiring the larger size housing. Once in the water the housing is pretty much neutral so you only have to battle the weight while in transit.
- The camera mounts to a tray connected to the rear portion of the housing. This makes it a little bit of a pain to change batteries and memory cards as you have to unscrew the camera from the tray each time you want to switch. Not too big of a deal but I thought I would mention this. There are two metal posts sticking out of the camera tray which contact the front of the camera to keep it in position. The posts are covered with a rubber cap to protect the camera body, however, I could not get the camera to fit on the tray without removing the rubber caps. I had to remove the caps and put a piece of electrical tape on the the camera where the posts contact the body for protection. Not pretty but it worked out. This is probably a first production issue and Ikelite should be able to fix this easily in the future by moving the posts slightly forward.
The controls all worked as they should except for the front ring control. The rubber piece that contacts with the dial didn't seem to make a snug enough fit to rotate the dial effectively. This might be an issue for people that use the front dial for manual focus.
- The rear dial control is a bit weird but works very well. The down button on the rear controls lets you toggle the mode of the rear dial between shutter speed and aperture control. This makes the operation woes of the front dial go away (except for manual focusing).
- The rear controls are kind of kind of squished together tightly on the back. The buttons are stainless steel and are not the easiest to press. Wearing gloves didn't give me any problems and I actually felt that it was easier to operate with gloves as pressing the buttons didn't hurt my fingertips. I was wearing thin, warm water gloves. Thick neoprene gloves probably won't work too well.
- The right button control on the rear "disc" is not easily accessible as the gear for the rear dial control blocks it. Ikelite has gotten around this by removing a crescent shaped "bite" portion of the disc. In order to operate the right button, the "bite" section of the disc needs to be rotated so that it is in the 9:00 position to give access to the button. The rear dial is always in use so most likely it won't be in the perfect position for the right button operation. In order to get the gear for the rear dial out of the way of the right control button you have to rotate the dial while pulling it to keep the gear from contacting the rear dial (which would change your settings). Kind of clunky so I would recommend against assigning anything useful to the right control button that you have to access many times underwater. I use a strobe all the time so I assigned my right control button to flash mode select, which is on force flash all the time so I don't have to change it. On land things are easier because the rear dial control knob is not being pushed in by the water pressure and stays out of contact with the rear control. Once you pull the knob out on land it stays out of contact with the rear dial and must be manually pushed back to make contact.
- The camera trigger for auto focus / shutter release works brilliantly. Very easy to auto focus and take pictures.
- The zoom control knob is located on top of the camera. It works well but doesn't have any spring mechanism to return the knob to a neutral position. I read about this issue beforehand about other Ikelite housings and didn't find it to be a problem for zoom operation. The bad thing I found is that if you forget and leave the control knob in the zoom-in or zoom-out position the camera won't go into standby mode which will drain your battery fast. The camera behaves normally so it's easy not to notice until your battery is dead.
Overall I think the Ikelite housing is very good value for the money and does the job nicely. The control issues I mentioned are quite easily overcome and shouldn't be a problem for most people. The Ikelite housing may not be a good choice for people who make extensive use of the front ring control.