As digital cameras move into the same obsolescence cycle as personal computers, quality built-to-fit housings such as this aluminum beauty from Marine Camera Distributors and Arrow Machine will become a rare site if not a distant memory. At a time when the Nikon Coolpix 900 didn’t stand a chance of focusing underwater, and other camera models were either buried in dumbish consumer over-simplicity or sprouting control surfaces everywhere, the Agfa ePhoto 1680 stood as the perfect balance between control and simplicity with the right feature set to enter the underwater world. A trip to Belize in March 1999 was on my schedule and I got my order in to MCD and waited. The housing arrived with two weeks to spare, along with the Ikelite VideoLite 45 I ordered with it. The two did not match up to my liking, so I set to adapting the fit so that the VideoLite arm was more stable on the tray. A piece of bent, cut and drilled plexi did the job in a pinch (see illust. 6, 7 at the end of the review). I got a rush shipment of four 16MB smartmedia cards,  ten Iomega Clik! disks. I packed it all with my Agfa Camera, the Iomega Clik! drive I received as a rebate on the camera purchase, my dive gear, and a few items of clothing. I was off to Tuneffe Island Lodge in Belize. The first couple of dives I shot on automatic. Same rapid moving blurred fish on the LCD alerted me to the camera shooting at a shutter speed too low to freeze any action. I switched to 1/125 second shutter priority, and that seemed to solve the problem. I shot at this setting the rest of the trip, except at night, when I switched to automatic with the built in flash.
 
  With the Ike video light, I was honestly disappointed with the results. On the brightly lit Belizian reef, the 50 watt light did not provide enough illumination to drive back the blue spectrum at my 60 ft. depth. At night it did not give enough light for decent shutter speeds. In daylight, only at distances under 14 inches from the subject did the light begin to approach something balanced. After returning from Belize I was able to salvage some of these shots by cranking up the yellows and reds with Adobe Photoshop.

 
 

From this attempted correction (too much yellow?) of a French Anglefish shot in Belize, you can see that some dramatic corrections are possible in photoshop.

I did have some good luck at night, while shooting with the on-board flash. Because of the close proximity of the flash to the lens, and the crude shape of the camera aperture, flash illumination of suspended particles in front of the lens (backscatter) is a real bad problem on this camera. Many of my night shots surprisingly avoided the problem, even with the sponge spawn occurring at the time.

The controls on this housing (3,4,5) are all grouped closely to the right hand. Except for the “menu” thumbwheel control, they are all surprisingly easy to use. Controlling the thumbwheel takes a bit of practice, but proficiency comes with use.

  The shutter control lacks the tactile feedback needed to diffrientiate partial depression for focusing from full depression for shutter release. Taping a stiff piece of mylar plastic over the shutter helps provide more resistance, making this feature easier to use.

The zoom control can stick on occasion. If your camera changes language while you are using the text menus, it is a sure sign that the zoom control is stuck.

The port on this housing is interchangeable, and MCD now offers a wide-angle port for use with the Kenko KUW-042 Macro Wide-angle adapter. I will be testing my port in Fiji in June of 2000.

The set of 4 NIMH batteries last well over my 50 minute dive capability. They can be swapped between dives, along with the smartmedia card without removing the camera from the housing. Don't forget to use your PC to change the sleep mode on the camera to the maximum five minutes. It can be very annoying rezooming the camera every time it times out.

The flat port was built a little small, so there is a vignette at the very corners of the frame when the camera is zoomed all the way out. While it is dissapointing not to be able to use the full wide angle capability pf the camera, I will get around this in June when I am able to test the wide-angle port option in Fiji.

On return from Belize, I set to solving the light problem. I arrived at a very economical solution. I ordered a couple of Ikelite AQ/S slave strobes and set out to get them working with the camera. Slave reliability underwater is an issue, and I had to get these strobes working at 100%. I ordered some 3mm single strand fiber optics from an internet vendor and attached two ends inside a rubber boot held on by velcro at the flash end. The optics ran through some black quarter-inch vinyl garden tubing to the slave ends, where a bracket mounted on the arms mated them with some velcro strips to the slave sensors.  TaDah!  A reliable dual strobe digital setup (not pictured).

I tested the setup in December, 2000 in Cabo San Lucas Mexico. Using the external strobe mode of the camera, and some on-site refinements to the fiber optics, I was getting GREAT COLOR! I even got some good closeups using diopters inside the housing.

The MCD/Arrow underwater housing combined with the Agfa ePhoto1680 provides a great solution for underwater digital still photography, even with the now aging Agfa ePhoto 1680 1.3 megapixel camera. While the new digital housings must sprout controls everywhere to support the needed features of new cameras and cameras devour batteries at an increasingly rapid rate, this system stands as a firm reminder of what camera designs are most suitably engineered to enter the underwater world.

Update: March, 2000. The housing reviewed here has been discontinued by the manufacturer. It was on the market around a year- a lifetime in the turbulent world of digital photography.