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I upgraded to a Canon 1DX Mk III plus Nauticam housing two years ago. My previous work horse u/w was a Canon 5D MkIII with 16-35mm + 8" dome. For land based shooting I had (and still have) a Canon 1D IV - that's why the 1DX III felt natural to me. Since I have half a dozen L-series lenses, I hesitated starting from scratch, especially with any other camera brand. Currently my main lense combination is Canon 28mm EF + WACP-1 (stills and video). However, when travelling "light", I use the Canon 8-15mm behind a small glass dome (stills only). For lighting I use either ambient light or Keldans, the CRI95 version. More than half of my shooting is for 3D photogrammetry projects. Pictures below show me "in action" and illustrate the need to shoot from close range.

Hi Dreifish, There are some other housing brands that offer compatibility between Sony a1 and a7SIII with a small up/downgrade kit. The main difference is in the dimensions and positioning of the camera tray. Plus some pushbuttons have slightly different spacing distance. Functionally the biggest difference is the location of the video start/stop button. However, in Sony you can reprogram the normal stills trigger to start/stop video recording. If I remember correctly, the last difference relates to the autofocus button. Let's see what Aquatica answers.

Thanks Kraken for your U.S. price compilation. It is interesting to notice that the U.S. prices show such a steep difference. Nauticam's recent price updates explains part of this, but are there other factors involved also? E.g. does U.S. have higher import duties towards products from certain countries and zero for products from Canada? For example here in Europe, the relative price difference between Aquatica and Nauticam is much smaller, though it does exist. The euro has become weaker against USD.

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Hi Sinetwo, I have done two diving trips to Cartagena, both times a week. Cartagena is a pleasant maritime port city. My main interest was exploring a cave system called Cueva del Agua. The second time I took with me my own team and we spent the week exploring the caves further and further away from the entrance. https://vimeo.com/176796652

A long time ago I made the mistake of using the bulkhead at the bottom of an Aquatica housing to connect to a monitor of a different brand. However, a video cable going downwards will get too much strain irrespective of how carefully you try handle your camera gear in a dive boat. My cable broke after a few dives. Lesson learned. Concerning bulkhead hole sizes, Aquatica video cabling has options for 1/2", 16mm (face seal) and 23.75mm (or 1" threaded). Without actually measuring it, my guess is that the bulkhead holes on the top of your housing would be 1/2" and 23.75mm. Based on Aquatica's product pictures of the 20093 housing, the 23.75mm port seems to be standard, i.e. not custom like you suspected. The 16mm bulkhead size can be considered for using a Aquatica monitor with some other brand housings and vice versa.

I have had an Aquatica housing with the same o rings for ten years now, all the time in place, housing closed. No apparent change on the O rings. However, having done maintenance on a number of Aquatica housings, I have noticed metal fatigue on the housing locks, in more than one case. If you do not use a vacuum system, the halves of the housing might not be pulled tightly enough together and this might watertightness near the surface. The metallic locks are easy to change. I think this is the only excuse to store the housing open. However the drawback is that dust might accumulate inside the housing in hard to reach places.

And here is the rig in action. It is hard work to continuously swim back and forth scanning the scenery in all different positions up and down. That's why I appreciate convenient and fast setup of the monitor into various angles. Pictures below courtesy of Kimmo.

I use the Nauticam Atomos arm plus a self-customized adapter. This adapter allows me to affix the Atomos arm to either the top or bottom of the Ninja allowing a large combination of positions. E.g. for photogrammetry work I can point the camera downwards and still view the monitor horizontally in front of my face and holding my horizontal trim. This customized adapter works also with the previous version of Ninja housings, i.e. the version without the larger screw holes for the Atomos arm.

For underwater use you have to consider reliability factors. I have received a fair amount of feedback on the previous generation of Nauticam 1.4 cables and bulkheads. You have to treat the cables carefully, or you will have contact issues due to the small size of connectors and thin cables. I have had to replace two in my personal use. Since the Weefine monitor seems to use the same bulkheads and internal cabling, the same findings are likely to apply to those as well. In particular, the external cable from the monitor to the camera housing looks very thin and thus might be fragile. The Anglerfish monitor seems to be in many respects quite promising. Initially I thought I might like the idea that they supply a set of internal conversion PCB based adaptors for most camera HDMI connections. However, it might have an Achilles heel with these PCB adaptors from the internal cable to the camera HDMI. If you look at their instruction video or read their user manual, they specifically point out to the need to be very careful with the connector. They also point out to some ways to strengthen this. However, making a 180 degree twist on the cable and using zip ties makes me concerned about the longevity of such a cable+adaptor. Disclaimer: I do not have first hand experience on Weefine, Anglerfish, Aquatica nor Hugyfot eventhough some of these are available via my company. I personally would want to find out if I could recommend one of these. Sofar, I have been conservative and stuck to recommending recent Nauticam monitor/recorder housings due to their more robust end-to-end HDMI 2.0 cabling, for each combination separately. Howewer, these solutions do cost more than 2000 USD/EUR.

Hi John, The product code was originally 21314 and then changed to 921314. We have delivered the last from our stock.

We have one of these rare items (9)21314 in stock. 240€ plus shipping from Finland to U.S. You will have to handle U.S. customs yourself. PM if you are interested.

If you shoot video in only 8-bit color space, you just do not have the same vibrancy of colors than a proper stills picture has. However, this gap is diminishing when moving to video with 10-bit or more color resolution. But then your data amounts might grow a lot. With my Canon 1DXIII I am able to fill a 500GB (half a terabyte) card by shooting only 36 minutes of video at maximum quality. In practice and for most of the shots, I use far lower quality. The Canon colors are actually quite beautiful already at 10 bit Clog if you properly color balance and expose your shot before shooting. Related to your second question, the answer is any hybrid camera capable of both video and stills, but minimum 10 bit color space for video. Typically I would shoot either video or stills during a single dive because each shooting method does require a slightly different mind set. But whatever my choice for a particular dive is, I still might take occasional stills or videos if there is a suitable opportunity.

A significant question is the shooting distance. If you use white fins on your own feet, will that white balancing match your actual shooting distance? I have noticed this problem because my white balance card is relatively small and I need to "white balance" it from a very short distance with my WACP wide angle lense. In ambient lighting the difference from actual shooting seems relatively small. But when using videolights, the perfect white balance at short distance does not match that of actual shooting distance. When shooting with videolights, the light has to travel from the lights to subject matter and back to the camera. If the subject matter is at say 2 meters distance, e.g. a ship wreck or other scenery,. the total light travel distance is 4 meters, which is significantly different from shooting a grey card at 0.2 meter distance. Thus the colors of subject matter will not be as vibrant. I like the idea of white or grey fins, but with a wide angle lense they will fill less than 5% of screen area. But, considering that a 130 degree wide angle lense will easily cover an area equivalent to a queensize bed, should I bring with me a queensized white sheet with me?? Ha ha. Obviously this gets more complicated when there is a combination of video light and ambient light. For single picture still photography this might be less of a problem because you might want to let the background to fade to blue or whatever is the dominant background color. But for shooting 3D underwater photogrammetry this is a problem because you would want to use true colors of the subject matter irrespective of the distance. Incidentally the Aquatica/Amphibico metallic white balance card has a prefabricated green/bluish color cast. This does slightly help in matching the final shooting distance for proper white balance. I have just recently learned to appreciate this.

Here is an in-scale visualization of the Protrekker 450 with the NA1DXIII, WACP, 1DXIII and lense. It looks doable, if I remove one handle. For the air travel that is ok. Total weight about 14kg with laptop. Perhaps I'll take with me a plastic bag. If weight or size becomes a problem, I'll check in the empty backpack and carry my gear in a plastic bag;-) The Keldans will have to fit elsewhere, e.g. my coat pockets or carried by a friendly mule...