Mike:
I'll gladly tell you what I can about the camera, although I'm still familiarizing myself with it. I've had it for only a few weeks, and haven't had the time yet to sit down and learn every single one of its features inside and out like I should. I'm in the process of setting up an album on this board's photo gallery, so you'll be able to see its results for yourself shortly. But in the meantime, I can give you some first impressions.
I chose this model for the same reasons you did. I wanted something that would serve me well both above and below the surface, and the 10x zoom was an absolute must have. I've been into photography for twenty years, and my main gripe about digital cameras is the lack of versatility in their lenses (I can't wait until Canon's digital EOS camera body comes into my price range, so I can use all my good lenses again). I think you'll be impressed with the zoom on this one. In my book, having that much telephoto capability is worth the fact that the camera is only a 4 megapixels, as opposed to some of the 5mp cameras you could buy for the same price. Picture quality is excellent. I've printed out some great 11" x 14" images with absolutely no visible pixellation, even along sharp, high-contrast edges within the picture (at about 160dpi of resolution). With my experience in Adobe Photoshop, I think I could get away with a 12" x 18" on a good day, maybe even a 16" x 20" if I used the camera's pixel interpolation feature that pulls a little cheat in order to virtually double your image size. Like every digital camera I've ever seen, it records images a little dark, but that's easily fixed in Photoshop or any other decent graphics program.
My favorite thing about it is its versatility. You can set this thing on absolute auto, where you just aim it and push the button with no further thought about settings. Alternately, you can set it to full manual, controlling the shutter speed, aperture, and even the ISO. Especially handy for the underwater aspect of our hobby is its customizable setting memory, which allows you to program different setting combinations which can then be recalled at the touch of a button - a handy feature for the sometimes tricky settings subsurface photography requires. It also has several levels of automation in between, such as settings that allow you to control only one aspect of the camera such as shutter speed, and it adjusts the rest of your settings around your manual input. You can even control how bright the internal flash fires, which is useful for macro work (this camera has some NICE macro settings, too).
Although I don't have a lot of use for it, another nice feature is its video capability. I got a nice mini-movie of my wife getting swarmed by fish as she was feeding them at about 20' deep off Catalina the other day. Of course, even at 20' there was a significant blue shift in the color tones, but that's to be expected since I don't have a floodlight. Still, it's a fun thing to be able to take mini-movies of your dive from time to time. Don't make them too long, though - the movies are recorded in Quick-Time .MOV format, and eat up a lot of memory (I have a 256mb card).
Dislikes? Not really. I've noticed that it sometimes has difficulty autofocusing if the telephoto is zoomed all the way in, but I'm not yet ready to call that a design flaw. I'm still learning about the camera, and I'm suspicious that the problem might still have a bit to do with operator error. The camera also has a manual focus feature, though, so I'm not too worried if it turns out that the autofocus doesn't always do what I want.
As far as the PT-018 housing is concerned, I like it. Its easy to use and seems solidly constructed. Its rated to a depth of 130. Ive taken it on five dives as of this post, but not below 60 yet. So far, so good. It performed flawlessly on each dive, and not the slightest bit of water made it into the housing.
Would I buy it again? Yes, absolutely. From what Ive learned of it so far, it has met or exceeded my expectations in every way. But bear in mind that my answer is based on less than a month of experience with the system.
Ill post more as I learn more, which is an ongoing process since this camera has a LOT of features I havent fully explored yet. If you have any specific questions, Ill be glad to answer them. In the meantime, I hope this post helped.
