What is ILC? Sorry, I don't recognize that acronym.
Interchangeable Lens Camera.
My pricing numbers are based on buying the 60mm lens used.
I'd be careful about fixating on the 60mm lens; on M43 it is has an angle of view equivalent to that of a 120mm lens on full frame, which makes framing quite tight. It's great if you're shooting tiny stuff, but you've indicated a preference for medium-sized subjects earlier in this thread - for that, 45mm or even 30mm may be a better fit.
The Pen E-LP9/10 just seems like a more flexible setup.
There are different kinds of flexibility. With a dedicated lens/port setup, you're locked in to a specific size of subjects for the duration of the dive, whereas with wet lenses, you can adapt to most situations without surfacing.
That said, the ability to shoot macro and wide on the same dive is very situational. Even in places where you have your pick of subjects and scenes (say, Richelieu Rock in Thailand), it's simply a different mindset. Shooting wide-angle, you're hovering over a reef, looking for that nice composition, waiting for the glassfish to frame the coral head
just so, or even out in the blue, chasing down a school of barracudas or whatever - there might be macro subjects out there, but you won't see them, because they're so small and camouflaged. Conversely, when you're shooting macro, your face is buried in the reef, looking through every crack and crevice, examining small leaves with a magnifying glass, trying to find that microscopic critter that will look oh so cool when blown up to a hundred times life size. That beautiful reefscape might be all around you, but you won't see it because that's not where your attention is centered. Yeah, if a whale shark shows up, someone will yank on your fin - but how often does that happen?
Switching also isn't instant - going from macro to wide, you need to take off your close-up lens, dock it, undock the wide lens, attach it to the port, zoom out, change aperture/shutter/ISO to wide-angle settings, reposition strobes, adjust strobe power, possibly attach diffusers... by the time you are done, that shark is likely long gone. You want to take quality photos of sharks, you splash down with the purpose of shooting sharks and don't spread your attention to macro.
My other observation was that the camera gear is part of the equation, but you really need lights and in particular good strobes if you want pictures that are very good.
This is unquestionably true. Photography is all about
light, everything else is secondary. No light - no photo.
The AOI case has an led trigger using the hotshoe to fire the strobes. It's a brilliant alternative to using the on-board flash which will burn the battery.
The primary utility of an LED trigger is not in battery savings but in ability to fire bursts. For example, my strobes (Retra Pro with superchargers) can shoot half-power at 3 frames per second pretty much indefinitely - the limiting factor is the buffer on my camera. However, most pop-up camera flashes take at least a second or so to recycle, which makes this capability inaccessible.
Keep in mind, however, that some strobes have low sensitivity optical receivers that have issues triggering on relatively weak light pulses from an LED trigger, in comparison with a strong signal from a camera flash. Sea & Sea YS-D3 is particularly famous for this. If you're buying used, Inon Z-240 (out of production now) had four revisions, and it's only the type 4 that features a high-sensitivity optical sensor for use with LED triggers. Also, if you're using LEDs, make sure that you get 613-core fiber optic cables rather than single core - they are a bit more expensive, but they get much better light transmission.
I'm pretty much sold on the PEN E-LP10. I want to sleep on it and maybe wait a day or two before I pull the trigger.
Me, I'd wait a little bit. OM Digital (former Olympus camera division) just released a new flagship model, the OM-1. If you watch the classifieds forums in the coming months, there's a good chance you could snag a used EM-1 II or even III setup at a significant discount from someone who is upgrading, which will give you a slightly better sensor and
much faster autofocus (E-M1 series and E-M5 III have PDAF; PEN series and earlier E-M cameras don't).
Here, for example, a full, almost ready-to-dive E-M1 Mark II system in a Nauticam housing, with camera, lenses and ports, lacking only arms and strobes, was offered for $3500 last month. Parts of it have already been sold, but with a new flagship out, I'd expect more and better deals to appear in the near future.
Yes, the beautiful Nauticam WWL-1 (28mm) or newer WWL-C are great but work best on a Nauticam housing. Other brand wet lenses may not have as good results.
It's a bit more complex than that. WWL-1 comes in two mount options - 67mm and Nauticam bayonet. These can be swapped by undoing a few screws. The 67mm mount will work with any housing equally well as long as the port fits the lens closely (i.e. minimal distance between camera lens front element and the wet lens rear element). However, WWL-1
B and WWL-C come with Nauticam bayonet mount built in and it cannot be removed. Nauticam offers #83250 M67 to Bayonet Mount Converter II, but there is a catch - the 67mm threads on that converter are on the inside of a narrow groove. Nauticam's own flat ports have the threading on the inside of a fairly thin protruding lip, which fits inside this groove, for example:
But some manufacturers tend to use a wider flange on the front of their ports, like this:
Or this:
...which precludes the installation of Nauticam's adapter.
Therefore, if your port's front is compatible with Nauticam's bayonet adapter, you can use WWL-1B or WWL-C without issues; if not - you're restricted to WWL-1.
