Beginner Camera

[sea_ledford]

Cheers for that Sea Ledford, Scuabozy. I've got the 250m Carbonarm ali housing on the way already, so that will be the next step.

I guess I'm just looking at the thinking around the new mirrorless vs used SLR question and lower range cameras such as the Sony A6xxx or Canon R50. I was looking at £5-600 for the camera, then will add in the housing and lights after, so that isn't the all in budget.
Rich

I would focus on which of those have good low light performance, then see if there is a housing to match. I was looking for similar specs (for less murky, but still dark waters) for a big mesophotic coral restoration project I'm on and went with a Sony A7iv in a marelux housing, and a pair of Light and Motion Sola 15000 video lights. We are making a documentary of the project, so I needed pretty high res video files as well, otherwise I think a Sony A6xxx series would have been fine for what I needed.

Your requirements quickly snowball into justification of pretty high end systems, because everything else just ends up being so full of compromises to save a couple hundred dollars. Next thing you know you've blown through your budget by thousands.

Rough place to start in the underwater camera world!