Thanks everyone who has contributed to this thread! (especially Nemrod, Compudude and Girellator) I finally finished reading all 54 pages of it. It has been very helpful but I have still so many questions I hope someone can help me with. I recently bought the S90. I am a complete newbie to wet lenses. ( I have only previous shot with a Sony T100 point and shoot in a housing with external strobe) After reading all your postings I am probably going to get the FIX housing and probably the FIX UWL-04 and FIX single piece 52mm lens mount.
What I am really confused about is in regards to macro lenses. There just hasn't been much talk or debate about macro lenses on this thread.
I went to Backscatter recently and they showed me & recommended their FIX flip lenses. Does anyone have any experience with these? It seems like a good idea because you can easily flip in how many lenses you want to stack relatively quickly.However with these lenses in place, there is significant vignetting that requires you to zoom in in order to eliminate it. The guy at Backscatter tells me that that is not an issue because when shooting macro you want the magnification anyway. I am completely new to shooting with add on wet lenses, so I have no idea if this is true. Is this really true?
It seems like most people on this thread are using the INON 165 macro lens. Does one have to zoom in too when using the INON macro lens?
Doesn anyone know what the differences are in shooting with the INON 165 macro lenses vs the FIX flip-in macro lenses? IS there a reason why everyone on this thread seems to prefer the INON macro lenses over the FIX flip-in macro lenses?
Sorry if my questions seem silly but I am so confused!
Interesting questions.
I have the Inon macro lens... and got it because it is a very nice piece of glass....however, the S90 has an issue with focus when using it, it basically wants to focus several inches in front of where you would expect it to focus...so you have to either move forward while holding the shutter down half ways, or use manual focus. Not sure why this happens, as the S90 is a contrast focus camera, and it clearly is not stopping at the highest contrast, but I know I am not the only one with the issue.
Regarding zooming.... well, if you leave the camera at 28mm equiv, macro is a couple of inches in front of the camera (or closer)... that makes lighting the object almost impossible. Zooming out give you some working distance...and working distance is a good thing... but one now gets into some design issue of a point and shoot camera. Lens on a DSLR that zoom, have their closes focus at the high end of their zoom range... you get the most magnification with say a 70 to 200 at the 200mm point. Lens in Point and shoot camera's are exactly the opposite...their closes focus and most magnification is at the widest angle...so as you zoom out, your usable focus range goes down...and while most point and shoot camera's have such small actual lens, depth of field is not that big of a concern, zooming out does reduce it.. and without any practical f stop range... there is not much you can do about it (zoomed all the way out, with the S90, you have F4.9 to F8.... just over one stop.)
So what to do? Well, I don't use that macro lens very much...unless I have a lot of time, am not moving and have something I want an image of.... I would actually consider the flip lens....they may or may not have the focus issue, but they are much easier to use...would be worth the try to me...
But just zooming out and using the macro mode can get reasonably close, so you might want to give it a try, here is a nudi, a little under an inch long using just macro
