Glasshouse

I’d be interested to see a test with the WWL-C and these new 24-50 lenses (Nikon Z as well). Would be great to have a travel friendly option even if the IQ drops a smidge.

On my Z9 the FX 4k120 mode isn’t great. The line skipping leaves weird artefacts in high contrast areas. Especially noticeable when using shallow depth of field where the focal plane is. There’s a crop version which is great though, It gives native UHD with a 2.3x crop, not the normal 1.5x of DX mode. I did notice nauticam state it’s got oversampled 4k120 on the Z8 page but this is an error… unless something has changed with the Z8 vs Z9 or maybe (hopefully) I’m missing something.

I don’t mind the smaller housing. If the Z8 housing had the internal battery pack component it would likely be the size, weight and cost of the Z9 housing. Battery life from reviews of the Z8 look pretty good considering the size of the battery, you should be able to get a good couple of dives on a single battery filming 8k 60 clips.. your more likely to be limited based on storage space as there’s only the single Type B card slot. It would be nice to have angled handles as an option.

Not long at all… https://www.nauticam.com/collections/mirrorless-il-camera-housings/products/na-z8-underwater-housing-for-the-nikon-z8-camera

No worries, if you ever want to have a play with some footage, let me know and I can send you a sample clip.

I absolutely love my Z9 but no camera system is perfect. I’m very happy working in post and you need to be reasonably competent with Resolve to get the most out of NRAW. I use a colour managed work flow interpreting the NRAW footage at Rec2020/Linear with timeline set to Arri or davinci wide gamut and output at Rec709. This lets me match footage to my BMPCC4ks BRAW using the same settings. One quirk with resolve is that no matter what the custom white balance is set too, once it’s past 10000K it imports into resolve at 10000k and tint always imports at 0. E.g if I set a custom wb and shoot a raw photo, import to lightroom, I can see a white balance value of 30000k and 100 tint. Take a video using that same custom white balance and import to resolve, it imports as 10000k and 0 tint but looks very similar to the still. The tint slider doesn’t seem quite as impactful as it should either and occasionally you need to add a node to push tint further than raw controls alone. The 12bit footage does seem to handle this exceptionally well though. This can be frustrating as I had previously been able to estimate the wb for a clip if I knew the rough depth I was at. I hope that since the lawsuit with red was just dropped, Black Magic invest a bit more time in the implementation of NRAW. Adding a Keldan filter lets you grab a custom wb deeper, I’ve used one at depths of 20m or so - beyond this there isn’t much red left anyway and lights are going to be your friend. I’m using the 28-75 2.8 in WACP-1 which normally gives something like 130-80 degree field of view which is a nice range. The filter prevents quite a bit of zoom through though - I would guess making it more like 130-110. I also learnt that 4.3k120 FX does not play well with filters, best to change to 4k120 DX which means you lose a little resolution but it’s no longer line skipped which causes weird problems at the focus plane. Even without the filter, you can recover colour nicely, like I said the 12bit footage holds up well with adjustments as long as your working in a colour managed profile. Because the camera just gives an error when you get too deep, you need to remember to have a custom wb saved at the most extreme depth you can successfully wb. That way if you descend too quickly and forget to wb as you go, you can switch to your max depth wb and know it’s going to be as good as it gets. Autofocus underwater is interesting, Ive had animal detection work on the most random creatures. It recognises jellyfish, picks up eyes of camouflaged cuttle fish (I’ve no idea how, it doesn’t event look like an eye) but sharks it has no idea about. You would think the machine learning would have had more shark pics than jelly fish but who knows. Using subject tracking in video with continuous works kind of like single point but then you can tap the set button to start tracking anything, when animal detection kicks in it’s really quite sticky but you generally need to be quite close for this. I alternate between this and custom mid sized box which I use for wider shots. I love how it also captures a 1080 proxy, not because working with the files is unmanageable but because cloud storage is cheap but nothing lets you preview raw footage without downloading. This makes archiving and re-downloading required clips a lot easier, you don’t have to down load a 10gb file just to check if it’s the right one. In short, if your prepared to do the work in post, you can do very well with the Z9 (and I assume the Z8) with NRAW, you just have to push past the nuances of a new codec that’s only recently been added to Resolve. It’s a fantastic hybrid providing professional level stills and exceptional video in the highest resolution currently available that’s not a dedicated cine camera.

I havn't shot with the 230 dome before so cannot offer any insights as a comparison. The lens is indeed the 'rebranded' Tamron. I went with this over the 24-70 F4 as it offers greater zoom through. The 28-75 will be fairly similar to your 14-30, a bit wider at both ends. It's also faster than the 24-70 at F2.8 which makes it useful as a portrait lens on a day to day basis on the surface. Im interested to see how far you can push that underwater, either way it's a nice to have. I will see if I can get in the pool at the weekend and get some sample shots for you at varying aperture / focal lengths so you can make your own comparisons in terms of quality - I am hoping to get out to the reef mid to October so will have some real world content then. The WACP on the Z9 housing is really nicely balanced, they are almost exactly the same height and width. It's about 300g negative at the front which is fairly easily resolved. In terms of packing the WACP, I was actually very pleasantly surprised after reading all the stories about how big and heavy it was. The lens comes with a padded travel bag as all Nauticam products do, however I can actually see myself using this one. Its a perfect fit with no wasted space due to the shape of the lens. It always annoyed me that the WWL padded case was too small to allow for the buoyancy collar installed - I assumed this was fixed with the WWL-1b? The WACP does also come with a hard caps, front and back, which I love, it's almost identical to the WWL-1 hard cap which I drilled a hole in the side to attach a small bungee (stolen off a GoPro grip). This means I can take it on the dive and clip it to the back of my BCD when not in use.. I don't have pockets big enough for it.. I was always very paranoid about the lens getting scratched when passing it up to a zodiac and them dumping it on the floor and this way I know its safe before I had it over.

I agree, with my WWL-1 on M43, I almost always have the lens bayonetted but seldom remove it. I did use it on the flip adapter, along with a CMC-2 which did “work”. It doesn’t lock out of the way but you can hold it with one finger with the buoyancy collar. I do like how the smaller wet optics are now appearing in the full frame port charts for other mounts (not just Sony) - that was my main point in reference to the original question relating to size and weight. I’m thinking for trips like Lady Elliot in Australia where you have a 15kg weight limit. As a reference, my Z9 with 28-75 2.8 and WACP-1 (on paper) weighs in at just shy of 10kg. I haven’t actually weighed to confirm but I would imagine that’s pretty close. This is with no lighting.

A new addition to the Z port chart is the 24-50 with the WWL-C. I’m considering this as an additional option for weight restrictive travel destinations weighing in at just over 1kg. Gives 130-80~ (All the way to 47 degrees if you include removing underwater and using the flat port) zoom through in addition to CMC-1 macro.

I’ll have the 28-75 with WACP-1 on a Z9 next week. Hoping to get out to the southern Great Barrier Reef in October and will let you know how it performs. It doesn’t have the same zoom through (the Nikon gives 28 - 48mm) as the Sony that Chris mentioned however it’s native and faster. Im curious to know how the 28-60 Sony goes on the megadap adapter, I haven’t found any info on it but that could open up the possibility of WWL for weight / cost saving option.

It looks like you are on to something with this. I just ran some tests and it seems in Photo mode, tint is adjusted when setting a custom white balance. In Video mode the same conditions resulted in a white balance with only the kelvin being adjusted. Tint was imported to resolve at 0. This would explain why you cannot white balance at depth in video mode. How deep where you able to custom WB in Photo mode? I should have my housing in a couple of weeks so will be able to test in more detail then. It would be nice to have a custom white balance preset for 'Deep' water to get as close as possible for exposure, even if its not 100% accurate.

I had a chat and was told that the 28-75 had indeed been tested and didn't make the cut with the WACP-C. We were not able to determine if this was due to it physically not fitting or optically not making the grade - either way the answer was pretty definitive. WACP-1 is the recommendation for that particular lens.

I'll check with Nauticam to see if we can get some clarity. The reason I wanted to check is that the 24-70 F4 is listed and this is a slightly bulkier lens (72mm filter thread). Im hoping it has just not been added yet as it hasn't been tested. I definitely like the idea of having a lighter cheaper version that sits between WWL and WACP-1.

35 1.8 S was listed as compatible with wwl-1 but has been replaced with the wacp-1 on the last revision of port charts, N120 Macro port 12 specifically says “This port is designed for use with the WWL-1 with the Nikon Z 35mm F1.8S lens.”

Hey Phil, do you actually know that the 28-75 doesn’t work with the WACP-C or is that an assumption made from the current port charts? Haven’t tested the new megadap adapter (reviews look promising) but I would rather sacrifice some zoom through and use a native lens.