Meikon/Sea Frogs new housings for A7rII series, A6xxx series

[ggibson]

I've seen some interesting new additions to the Meikon lineup lately--this housing with a built-in dome port and natively supports the 16-35/4 is only $390:

Sony A7R II / A7S II 40M/130FT Underwater camera housing kit with SeaF

Also, they have a new housing that supposedly fits all of the A6xxx series:

Sony A6500/A6300/A6000 60m/195ft SeaFrogs Underwater Camera Housing

Anyone try out either of these? I've heard mostly good about Meikon, but putting $3K worth of gear into the A7rII housing feels pretty risky.

 

[Barmaglot]

I have the SeaFrogs housing for my A6300 with 16-50mm lens, Meikon wet dome, tray and a HowShot 67mm magnetic adapter. Haven't had the chance to dive with it yet, but took it snorkeling a couple times. With the above, in salt water, there's just a hint of positive buoyancy - if I let it go on the surface, it floats with just the tops of the 1" balls on top of tray arms poking out of the water. On the surface, with bright sun overhead, the camera screen is utterly unusable - I had to squint through the housing to use the EVF. I suppose at depth it will be better, but on the surface, I had to pretty much guess at framing and hope for a good focus. There's a hint of vignetting in the corners at 16mm with the wet dome attached - I suspect this is caused by the magnetic adapter which puts the dome a few millimeters further from the lens than it's meant to be, but haven't tested without the adapter yet. Otherwise, no complaints - after several hours of going in and out of the water, the camera inside stayed perfectly dry. I did scratch the acrylic dome when an errant wave tossed me against a rock, but that's my own damn fault - ordered a tube of acrylic polish from Aliexpress; if that doesn't help, this will mean $75 for a replacement dome.

 

[ggibson]

Thanks for the feedback. How's the build quality of the housing? Can you access all controls?

BTW, be careful with trying to polish out scratches. I tried one of those micromesh kits to fix an acrylic dome on a wet lens that I have and it is nigh impossible to get it truly clean. The micromesh kits use a coarse grain to sand down the whole dome and then gradually finer grains to smooth the surface. Unfortunately, even the finest grain is not enough and I can still see small scratches. From a glance, it looks perfectly clean and actually works OK underwater now, but there is some loss of contrast on the edges of the dome. Above water, the scratches become more visible so over/under shots don't look good anymore. I don't know whether the polish you're trying is similar, but just a warning.

 

[Barmaglot]

The only control that is not accessible is the power zoom rocker on the kit lens - everything else works. Zooming works via the zoom/focus ring, but if you want to use zoom and manual focus, you have to switch via the menus. There's also no way to close the pop-up flash without opening the housing, and no way to disable it via the camera controls once it's open, but it's possible to trick the camera into thinking the flash is closed - there's a small magnet in the pop-up flash, and probably a hall effect sensor underneath it, so if you take two small but strong magnets and place them on the housing's back door, one inside and one outside, you can use the outside magnet to slide the inner one to the flash position and this will trigger the hall effect sensor.

One minor annoyance is that the two top knobs contact the camera dials edge-to-edge, so you have to rotate them in the direction opposite to the one you want the camera dials to move. Obviously this renders the markings on the mode dial knob thoroughly useless, but the housing is translucent, so you can peek inside and see the actual position of the mode dial, even when the sun washes out the screen completely. The rear dial has an extra sprocket between the knob and the ring that contacts the dial, so it spins in the proper direction.

A6000 and A6300 have a single C1 button on top, near the shutter button, while A6500 has C1 and C2 buttons in a slightly different location, so the housing has three buttons on top to cover all possibilities. There's also a few extra plastic parts included in the kit for fitting an A6000, but I don't have one to test how well they work.

The 16-50mm lens, when extended, comes up right against the port glass - I don't think there is even enough space to fit a filter. If I don't remove the lens cap prior to inserting the camera into the housing, it bumps into the glass and causes the lens to retract.

There's a leak sensor at the bottom of the housing - I don't know how well it responds to actual leaks, and I hope to never find out, but touching it with a finger causes it to flash a small red LED and beep fairly loudly.