Interesting Dilemma re: Sealife DC500

[ScubaCatgirl]

Just got back from a wonderful vacation, but had a strange occurance occur with my camera. Am curious to see if anyone here has had a similar situation or can shed some light into this situation. As it was we were vacationing in Roatan were it was extremely humid and lucky us got a room with a air conditioner from anartica, lol. Meaning, it froze us out, we could not turn it up & I literally shivered under blankets at night. It took a good 5 minutes after leaving the room before the glasses on my face defogged & another 15-20 minutes for the land camera to defog, sometimes longer. I suspect it took the Sealife DC500 the same amount of time to defog from the tempature differance as well.

The 1st dive I took it out on it work wonderfully. The 2nd dive of the day. Nothing. It froze up on me & I ended up diving with a dead camera. When I left the water I noticed that inside of the housing was all fogged up. Now, I know you might suspect the batteries, but they are fairly new & had been charged within the last few days, so I know it wasn't the batteries. That night I opened the housing & discovered some water in the housing & figured the camera was ruined. WRONG! Yahoo!!!! I inserted a new battery & the camera came to life & I got to review all the pictures I took of the 1st dive. I changed the O-ring just to be safe & took the camera with me on the dive the following day.

The Sealife DC500 worked on the 1st dive of the day & on the 2nd dive, just like the previous day, it died!!! Ok, something strange is going on here. After the 2nd dive I looked at the housing & camera & sure enough, there was fog inside the housing again. I went straight to the camera shop, housing & all. We dried it off & opened it up. Now, the camera itself..........it's on & off button is permanetly depressed & won't budge. Both the camera expert & myself conclude that the camera is dead. Why, we have no idea as there was no water in the housing today when we opened it up & it was working last night after I inserted a new battery into it & before I went on the dive today, just to make sure, I inserted a freshly charged battery instead. Camera is dead as a doornail. So I rented a camera for the week & figured I'd be buying a new one when I got home.

I completed my dives for the day, & later that evening, just the grins of it, I decided to put a new battery in the camera & freak of freak. I was able to turn the camera on.

So can someone tell me what in the world in going on with my camera? Why did the on & off button get stuck? Did the differences between the freezing room & the higher humidity difference play a factor into the camera malfunction? Or is the camera just possessed, lol?

 

[f3nikon]

Oh my! Thought keeping the camera in an air condition room was the way to prevent the camera from FOGGING?

What is happening is the cold surfaced camera (due to the A/C), is causing the warm moist air water molecules to stick on to the camera's colder temperatures as you step outside the A/C room, same thing that is happening to your sunglasses.

That is why (and I mention this many times) I have using a hair dryer set on low heat, to "burn off" the water sticking on the surface and to warm up the camera's insides to prevent the water in the air from sticking (condense) on to a cold surface.

After the camera has been warmed up, only then should the camera housing be closed, the heat generated from the camera being "on" is enough to keep the water in the air from sticking on to it's surface.

Keeping the camera warmer than the outside air is the only way to prevent this from happening, water and electronics do not work so well together. And those moisture trapping packs are NOT needed in the first place if you burn off all the water from the camera, before closing the housing lid. I mean where would the "new" water come from to cause the fogging on the camera? Water does not reappear out of no where as if by magic? Unless there maybe a leak in your housing letting the seawater in... now you may have a bigger problem.

I see this problem on my laptop computer when I am in the tropics.

 

[wjefferis]

You can also put in one of these dessicant anti-fog packs inside your sealife camera. Check out this link or your local dive shop http://scubatoys.com/store/detail.asp?PRODUCT_ID=SL911 . Hope that helps, good luck.

 

[ScubaCatgirl]

Thanks F3nikon. Kinda figured the differences between freezing room tempature & tropic tempature outside played a factor into camera malfunction. Btw, I also used those moisture munchers. I'm religious about using them, but my LDS has a bad habit of selling stock that has been on the shelves for some time, thus the moisture munchers were mostly blue (as they should be) but did have some pink crystals in them. Needless to say, this is the last incident with my local LDS.

Thanks guys!!!! Your responses helped!!!!

 

[gregorio]

You can put your dessicants few secondes in the microwave to remove the humidity and re-use it.

 

[CheddarChick]

or bake them on 200* for about an hour. I found they don't distort the shape that way. I had some minor fogging in Curacao but it never affected the workings of the camera

 

[robertarak]

Is the button still stuck? If so, your battery issue could be cause by that. Having the button stuck could be quickly draining your battery. Moisture would not really acount for the rapid battery drain, but the stuck buttton would. Just a thought.

 

[rrrru4ril]

I had a similar issue with my DC600 camera while snorkeling. It worked without any problems during my dives while scuba diving earlier. Basically, my guess was that due to the high heat generated by the sun (I left the camera in a sunlit spot) the heat baked the moisture out of whatever surfaces and items it had been retained in and coated the inside of the camera optics. The camera itself never stopped working, I was just shooting through a fogged up lens. The next snorkel trip I kept the camera in the shade and I didn't have a problem after that. Dive boats usually have a fresh water bucket for cameras so storage was taken care of between dives.