Jacq

Thank you so much everyone for the responses! Really helpful and has given me a lot to think about. Really appreciate it I didn't even think about the long zooms on the more recent compacts causing a lot of the issues. I guess making good compacts suitable for underwater photography isn't going to be a priority for most manufacturers. I guess my main reason for asking after them is it's nice to be able to swap from macro to non-macro shots where I usually dive as the dive conditions are pretty variable (one day you'll get in and have <5m viz and it'll be a macro day only if you want to shoot something and I don't love bringing extra camera gear and leaving it unattended in the car for long periods of time as I know people who have had problems with car break ins though I've been ok myself so far) the next you might get good conditions with rays and sharks appearing out of nowhere as you're about to photograph another seahorse. Because of the way the currents run, sometimes viz starts off ok, then becomes terrible within a relatively short period of time. Fun times! Looks like I really might need to seriously consider a cameras with changable lenses if I want to upgrade past the canon I have though. Yeah it's a shame their battery life is so bad and it's one of my main complaints with it. I guess that's one of the trade offs with small cameras (although the s series canons seem to have a particularly bad rep compared to others from what I've heard). @Lewis88 I used to have a s95. It was a great camera (battery life and really poor video aside). Although the s120 is better in low light (which I often need) TBH I thought the s95 actually seemed to often do a much better job at focus, colours and rarely got overblown photos compared to my s120.

Hi there. I hope this is ok to ask for some advice. I've had my canon s120 and an inon strobe for a number of years now. I'd call myself a mid level photographer? (Not a complete beginner, but not an expert either.) It's ok, but lacking in a few areas. Although you can get nice photos from it, it seems to have a lot of issues with focus, over exposure and dull colours when used underwater. (I often take photos on breath hold diving so it's not always possible to carefully manually balance everything same as on scuba and some stuff needs to be used on auto where possible. I use RAW but there's a limit to how much photos can be fixed especially if areas are horribly over exposed.) Battery life isn't fantastic, but if I keep it turned off most of the dive you can work around it. Video is very, very ordinary. (My Gopro 3+ blows it out of the water for video when I decided to do a direct comparison this week. I don't usually use them together so hadn't realised just how bad the quality of the canon's video is. I mostly take photos, but it's nice to be able to take video when you see something particularly amazing, and not have it be a hazy mess too.) Anyway, I was thinking about upgrading, but as everyone here knows, that's not a cheap task and I was hoping to do it right! I didn't want anything too large due to the freediving thing, and honestly can't really justify an SLR camera to take underwater anyway. There's so many options I've been at a loss to work out how to narrow the selection down. Can anyone recommend a better compact or possibly mirrorless that's at the mid level price range or below or recommend some pages that are good reading for this or how to go about a decision making process? (I get it's all personal preference but there's so many opinions out there.) Or unless I'm willing to upgrade to something really pricey (aka thousands of $ for the camera and case), am I better sticking with the s120. Thanks in advance

Hi there, new member from Australia. I think I needed to make a post on this forum but this is the only thread I have access to! (Sorry if my post is in the wrong place.)