Hello everyone,
I am new on here and this is my first post!
Edward, we met at the Shanghai dive show, my friend was buying the 5DM3 housing and I bought a RX100 housing. First vacation my wife took over the camera and kept it as she wants do shoot underwater too from now on, which is ok so I can buy a new one for me ;-)
I am pretty much drawn into NEX 7 as this for me right now is the best compromise between SLR performance and compactness.
As we discussed the lens range for the sony e mount isn't the best so far, but on the wide angle end, what I am interested most in, Samyang came up with some very good lenses, e.g. the fisheye 8mm f3.5 or the f2.5 version sold as Rokinon but also made by Samyang just like Walimex and others.
The lenses got some pretty good reviews on land other than the sony pancake + converter very sharp all the way into the edges, so I think these would make a good underwater lens.
So my question have you tried any of these lenses with your housing? I think I read somewhere that there would be vignetting behind your 4.33" dome? Will there be a wider dome available in the future? How about the manual operation I think it would not be an issue to set the focus on land and leave it fix during the dive on a fisheye lens but might be useful to be operational, would that somehow work?
Any other suggestions for wide angle setups? I would definately like to get the 10-18mm and something like a 8mm fisheye, though I do not like the sony pancake/converter solution as it is really very soft in the edges. I also thought about getting a SLR housing but it just adds up on weight and size as we are already traveling with 2 rebreathers... but if this would be the only way to get decent fisheye and wide angle quality I might need to go down that road.
Thanks for any comments!
Christian