I'm still using my olympus 5050. I know thatthere may be better, and smallr, cameras out there by now, but Ihave somuchmoney invested in my INON lens, and dome port, that there will have to be a pretty big jump in technology to get me to sell it off and move up into something else.
My wife has a little Casio Z55 and I have had the chance to borrow a housing for it and shot a few picutres under theice this pasrt winter. the camera is SMALL and you hardly even notice carrying it aorund. the main downside is that there is no rapid fire mode and I do miss that while freediving. There are also no wide angle lenses that fit the housing for underwater use- that I am aware of. as a result I let her keep that as her land camera. It does have a nice video mode and now that you can get larger cards for a lot less moeny than a couple of years ago it does become a pretty nice little package- although the special batter that it takes is a bit of a drag.
I know that Ted (UNIRDNA) sold off his 5050 and just bought a new Cannon S-80 with a housing. there is a way to attach a wide angle lens to it and it does have a really good video mode so he seems to be pretty happy with it. I think he said he just bought a 4gig card to use with it so he'll never run out of memory. I've seen the housing and it is smaller than the OLY PT015, but still no where near as small as the Casio.
My father-in-law just picked up a Sea+sea DX8000. it has a wide angle lens that can be added on and is just about the same camera as the S-80 when comparing video modes and rapid fire features. The housing is about the same size as the S-80 and the hosuing is rated to 180' instead of 140'. The video quality has been so good that he has hardly been using his underwater video set-up at all, especially since this thing is 1/10th the size!
Maybe in a couple more years I can get a camera the size of the Casio with all the features of the S-80, a 10 gig memory card, and have a wide angle lens on the front- all for less than $100.
Jon
