Compact Camera with RAW, stabilization?

[MargieW]

I am looking for a compact camera that has RAW capability, image stabilization, and a reasonably priced underwater housing available. Can anyone suggest a camera to look at? The only one that's been suggested so far is the Olympus SP-550 UZ with the PT-037 housing. After reading the review on www.dpreview.com, I'm not sure that this will do well for me because of the slow shutter speed, so I thought I'd ask if anyone knows of any other possibilities.
Thanks in advance!
Margie

 

[jsmharley]

I am in the process of getting a Canon XTi 400d. Will probably go with the Ikelite housing as well. Camera looks to be around the 800-900 range so far and the Ikelite is about 1200 from what I have found. Hope this helps ya some.

 

[Halthron]

I am looking for a compact camera that has RAW capability, image stabilization, and a reasonably priced underwater housing available. Can anyone suggest a camera to look at? The only one that's been suggested so far is the Olympus SP-550 UZ with the PT-037 housing. After reading the review on www.dpreview.com, I'm not sure that this will do well for me because of the slow shutter speed, so I thought I'd ask if anyone knows of any other possibilities.
Thanks in advance!
Margie

I haven't been bothered by the shutter speed, more the slow save times with RAW and with 7 and 15 fps mode. I was taking a number of pictures of an outside basketball game in the evening and both the single shot and 15fps worked great but if the buffer filled from the 15 fps, it would take 7-9 seconds before I was able to take another picture. No UW tests yet.

 

[Diver Dennis]

There are some stickies that alcina put together with a lot of the information you may be looking for. This is a good one to start with...http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?t=156914

 

[RonFrank]

The days when non-DSLR's have high end features like RAW are coming to a close.

Most consumers don't use them, and DSLR's are feature rich at a price that is affordable once again to hobby photographers.

Why do you need image stabilization UW? You can not shoot creatures at much under 1/60 without the risk of movement. Maybe there are times when it COULD come in handy, but strobe also can freeze motion to some extent. IS/VR was pioneered by Canon for sports photography using big lenses. Big being 200mm+. Some marketing type determined that it could be sold to consumers even with wide angle lenses. Some implementations are much better than others.

For Topside it does come in handy in a lot of situations.

Sorry I can not be of more use, but with your requirements, people may have suggested the ONLY camera on the market that exists. With such a HUGE zoom range the lens suffers from the normal issues with such extreme ranges. Macro is also noted as a low point on the camera which IMO is something UW photographers tend to want.

There are some real nice choices in the PnS arena out there, but unfortunately most will NOT have RAW, and IS.

 

[zahner]

there is a firmware hack for the Canon A710 IS that enables RAW, among other things. Than might be as close as you can get to getting RAW and IS in a PnS at least in Canon's lineup.
a few folks seem to have experimented with the hack over on another board but I don't have any personal experience with it.
hth

 

[Gilligan]

Compact non-DSLR = Fuji E900 or Olympus SP350. Both have RAW but no image stabilzation.

RAW is pretty much history on compact cameras.

 

[RTRski]

Gilligan:

Why is that, really? I mean with memory coming down in price, and faster memory cards too, its not the penalty of the extra storage space. I can understand that most consumers "don't use it" but then most consumers don't use macro mode, either, and you don't generally see that disappearing. With often the same controller chips used up and down a camera line and soft menus, it's almost 'free' to turn on features, or else the aforementioned firmware hack to get a RAW output from a 710 wouldn't be available, so its not like the manufacturers benefit from 'cheaper components' by not including it.

Is it just the "iPod effect"? People are so used to the way digital shots look with JPEG compression, they can't distinguish the better postprocessing you might get out of RAW? (similar to the way most people can't hear how crappy MP3 or other codecs sound at higher compression rates, hence the 'iPod' comment...)

For underwater use I don't really mind going into dSLR form/fit scales, I'm just surprised that we'd see a trend (I'm taking your word it exists) to 'lose' features as time goes on from compacts, rather than gain them...

 

[alcina]

Some of my thoughts on why we're losing RAW...

1 - it wasn't ever really wide spread through the compact market so not many miss it.

2 - more people want what they shoot to be what they get. Just like the good ol days with film. You shot, you took it in, they printed, you picked it up. You didn't muck about in the darkroom and you likely didn't take your camera off of auto mode. You have to remember the market...those of us who like control over our images through "film" choice, settings, better lenses etc are a small part of the compact demand.

3 - the number of people actually post-processing their photos is pretty low. It's still, and likely to remain for a long time, something that a relatively small minority does with much regularity.

4 - RAW is scary. It can put consumers off a model. So dump it and sell more cameras.

5 - those consumers who want features such as RAW are likely more comfortable heading to a dslr set up and those are coming down in price and up in features. They are also getting smaller. There are some very good "all rounder" lenses to be had for what many "normal" people would consider a reasonable price.

 

[hvulin]

Well, but we all know that it's not the camera price that's the problem, but the price of everything else... (lens, housing, ports, strobes...)

with a compact you can just buy a camera and a housing and get pictures, but with dslr you need at least: camera, lens, housing with port, external strobe

and now, the numbers are not so cheap anymore...