peterbkk

Well done on capturing the event.  I have only tried twice but never managed to have the camera pointing in the right direction when they lift up from the dead coral.

Wow, that halo is bad.
 
It doesn't look like it has anything to do with the subject, as the "halo" does not follow the subject but stays centred.  If there was no subject, just water, and the lens was manually focused somewhere between 1 meters and infinity, does the halo circle appear?
 
Could it be something to do with parallel light reflecting around between the lens and the sensor, created when the lens is focused out past 1 meters distance.  If so, that ought to be repeatable on land in similar lighting conditions.

Maybe a different lens / port might get rid of it?
 
Regards
Peter

Very nice.  That is a great dive.  Last time I was there, a bunch of juvenile white tips were zooming all over the place and a walking shark was sleeping under a coral. And the Mantas were buzzing us at the end of the ridge.
 
The RX100 is an incredible camera. I wonder how the Sony product management people let it get through without dumbing it down a bit. I still prefer the Canon XF100 for video but the RX100 is almost there.
 
Regards
Peter

Ah Simon,

 

I think that I see your problem.  What can you expect if you shoot video of a "shitter graveyard"  That's your problem: shitty subject matter...   

 

Seriously, I recognise many of those problems from the Sony CX-550 underwater: excess green, red fuzzies, low DR.  My guess is that Sony have used the same colour engine.

 

I also recognise the nice Canon underwater colours.  My XF-100 does that.  Just gotta change the preset for each depth range and almost no post colour work is required.

 

I did have some success with the Sony CX-550 by doing a MWB on a brown subject (e.g. brown coral, rust) as that seemed to damp down the problems in the red channel.  But, at depth, I used to have to mix in some video light onto the subject to get it to even accept the MWB.  Fiddly and hit-and-miss.

 

If it is the colour engine, I wonder if you could reverse engineer some external gel filters that offset the camera's problems.

 

Or. eBay it and buy a Canon...

 

Regards

Peter

 If it's a MWB/S35 EXMOR sensor issue, Sony may not be able to fix it even if they wanted to.

Do Sony ever fix issues in the existing range? Especially if it only affects a small subset of their customers. Or, due to planned obsolescence, do they usually wait to fix it in the next product?

This problem, or something very similar, has been around since the CX550. Maybe something in the firmware of their colour engine that only impacts under certain lighting (very low red) conditions, does not impact topside shooters and keeps getting copied across as they develop new models. Looks like the color engine is increasing the gain in the red channel.

Can gain be locked in the FS100?