First underwater camera

[andy_j_briggs]

Hi

I'm looking to get an underwater camera setup, as unfortunately I got my existing camera before starting to dive and no housing is made for it. I'm not sure though which direction to go in, I've been offered a used Konica-Minolta X60 with housing for £150, but am also looking at compact cameras like the MJU600. Another option is a refurbished Oly C-5000 or C-5050, although I'm not sure of the difference between these 2 cameras and how they compare to the more modern compact cameras.

Can anyone help by providing some advice on what to look for/which of these cameras is the best - I'm just looking to take some holiday diving snaps, so cost is quite important (and I won't be using a strobe), however I'm not keen on getting rubbish that will need to be upgraded in a year or two!

Thank

Andy

 

[kapula]

5050 is a classic. It has good optics and you can do all manually. One very important thing is that your camera has a manual white balance. I'm not quite sure if mju has it but 5050 has it for sure. 5050 is quite a bit older and bigger but if they cost about the same you get that much better photos with 5050 both on land & underwater. If you are looking just to snap a photo here and there you mite like to have a quite compact camera as mju but on the other hand then you usually start trading off optics and the sizre of ccd. You mite find good quality from older canon's aswell the g-series has good optics and pretty much all of the canons have manual white balance. I started off with a70. With this little specs you propably won't find any thorrow answers but from your list I'd definitely go for 5050.
Hope this helped even a bit