What's the best cheap U/W digital camera for the money?

[KeithG]

And I lied about the sealife. It is a housed camera (the dc1400 at least). They rebrand some sort of Olympus camera and have built a housing around it.

This is similar to what S&S did for a while where they rebranded some cameras from GE, Praktica and Ricoh. I have the S&S DX1G which uses a Ricoh GX100.

If you want new, then you can likely find a new sealife setup in your budget.

---------- Post added April 19th, 2014 at 04:18 PM ----------

As flareside indicates, "real" strobes will be your big ticket items. Toy strobes are much cheaper and you get what you pay for.

Since you indicate that you want to take "artist reference" shots, then I assume u are not overly worried about proper color capture. You could just skip the strobes (for now). As long as you get a camera that can add stones later, then you can wait to see if you really need the strobes.

Another idea is buying a camera with a hotshoe and using your exiting nikonos strobes in manual mode via wired sync cables....

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I've decided that I'm not going to jump into something quite yet, not until I can afford what I really want.
Looking around, I'm realizing that I'm going to have to spend several K to get what I want.
I'm going keep using the Nikonos for now and just deal with film.
There are places to still get it developed and I'll have them put it on disc.
I could even use B/W film and get the imagery I need.
That 20mm lens with a 200 and 50 Ikelite strobes is pretty sweet and I would probably have to spend some $$$ to replace them.