bvanant

Are you guys sure Bali is open to visitors from the US? We have been following the Bali story quite closely but keep seeing it is still a mandatory 5-day quarantine in Jakarta and not open to US but only to the 19 countries (China etc.) Bill

bump, still available, make me an offer Bill

DP-100 N85 for the Nauticam housing and the panasonic 8 mm. I am selling one with the lens if you are interested Bill

I think the free version of Davinci Resolve might be what you are looking for. Bill

For sale is a very seldom used Zen coated glass 4 inch port the ZEN DP100 (Nauticam) and a pristine Panasonic 8 mm super wide angle lens (fisheye)Up your wide angle game with this port and lens that can be used on both Olympus and Panasonic cameras.New the DP100 is $1000 and the 8 mm lens is $800. This is a wonderful setup for close focus wide angle as well as for reef scenes and large critters. The port and lens can be yours for $850, shipped in the continental US. Overseas shipping is at your cost.Bill

I guess that I have to repeat myself (again). I HAVE had significant issue with Toslink cables firing S&S strobes in TTL mode. Sometimes they worked sometimes they didn't. So here is your first report of Toslink not working. There are scads of places to get 1 or 2 or you pick it mm diameter single core end glow fiber. Some is better than others. i-fiberoptics sells Eska fiber for $1.50 or so per meter, on Amazon as we speak, Toslink cable (the amazon brand is $2 per meter more or less. Startech is more like $1.25. You can get just fiber for less if you buy more. The issue with Toslink is that you are paying for the connectors; just buy the cable. The multi-core cable has significantly higher transmission than the same cross section single core fiber as tested in our lab; in the real world it is hard for me to test the triggering efficiency of strobes as a function of input light power; I know some folks have done it but I don't have the test equipment. As for heat/coiling causing a change in transmission it has not been observed. I have tested cable throughput before and after coiling with no measurable (<10% loss). As I said before I like 90 degree connectors and those are hard to make from fiber that has a 40 mm minimum bend radius. In any case, time to stop talking about cables and lets go diving (but I think the oil rigs are probably off limits for a bit). Bill

For sale a very nice (glass is perfect) Zen DP 100 dome for micro 4/3 Nauticam housings. $990 new, yours for half price. Bill

Well I am not sure what you mean by "untested". I have made a bunch of cables from this fiber as have Sea and Sea and Inon and many others. For triggering TTL via LED for some strobes I have found the Toslink unreliable. For firing via onboard strobe it works fine. I personally like to use 90 degree connectors on both the strobe and housing end and that is not possible with thick single fiber material since the minimum bend radius is too large for the single fibers. As for the group buy that is a problem only in the sense that if you don't live in the U.S. the supplier of the fiber by the meter charges a ton to ship to Europe. If you are willing to pay duty and shipping getting it in the EU/UK/... is simple but expensive. Getting it in the U.S. is trivial ($7.50 per meter). Bill

The link to the German company is for single core fiber as far as I can tell, no for the Asahi material. I will be happy to order 100 meters which will be $750 plus about $13 shipping to a Miami address. Typically I get mine from i-fiber in about 3 days here in Los Angeles. We can work out how to pay me once I get it ordered. Send my you address in Miami and I will have it shipped there. bill.vanantwerp@gmail.com BVA

The i-fiber guys have had the 1.5 on and off by the meter. My guess is the spool is like 10 inches in diameter (254 mm) and about 5 inches thickness. Less than 5 kG total. BVA

Certainly the 1mm cable and the Nauticam LED and Z240 works well at least in my hands Bill

I will repeat my offer to buy a spool if someone wants to hand carry it back to the EU/GB. I suspect most folks would like the 1.5 mm cable. Bill

But of course this is not useful information about reliability in any way. There is way too much selection bias and without knowing the denominator (i.e. total number of strobes being used) all you can surmise is that some strobes of some specific type have some problems. I think that there was a really useful discussion by Alex a while back that talked about which strobes failed most while on his trips. I think that S&S was most likely to fail particularly the D2 and the Z240 appeared to be quite reliable. Of course this is another biased set of data (only the broken strobes were discussed, with no data on how many of the strobes were actually used) but probably can be thought of as close to truth. Bill It would be useful but very unlikely for manufacturers to give out data like MTBF but like charging times it might turn out to be mostly fiction. Bill

In general there is more light transmission with the 1.5 mm core fibers than with the 1 mm core. If you are using an LED to fire your strobes as opposed to an onboard flash and your strobes are hard to fire (S&S) then you might be in the situation where the 1 mm core is not as reliable as the 1.5 mm core. OF course if you use the Inon bushings you could put 2 fibers in each bushing. Bill

I don't think you can beat Weldon's quality https://www.weldoncolorlab.com but they are not cheap. Bill