LX10 / LX100ii / RX100 VII ???

[Rolo1]

Hi Everyone.

I’m looking to buy a camera to accompany me on my dives but I’m struggling to make a decision and was wondering if you could help me out.

I have a max budget of £2500 GBP (Including housing) which from what I’ve seen puts me in the price range of the following cameras.

Panasonic LX10/LX15
Panasonic LX100 II
Sony RX100 VII

the camera is mostly to shoot video but would also like the camera to be able to take a reasonable image too if required.

Could you please give me your recommendations as to which of these cameras would best suit my needs (with some reasoning behind your choice if possible) or if you know of any other camera that would suit me better for around the same money, please feel free to recommend.

Many thanks
Lee

 

[Chris Ross]

Do you need to add wet lenses? How about video lighting or are going to custom WB? British waters or travelling to warm blue waters? All this will make some difference in recommendations

 

[Rolo1]

Thanks for your reply Chris.
If I’m being honest I have years of photography experience but don’t understand wet lenses as of yet, I can hazard a guess and say that they are lenses that will fix to the housing to give a different field of view / perspective?

if it helps I don’t envisage filming any macro type stuff, I mainly just want to film a good quality log of my dives which I can edit in premier pro and be happy with the results.......if it helps further it will mainly be wrecks, diver shots, and the occasional fish / scenery type of shots (I’m guessing mostly at the wider end of the lens)

I will be mostly be diving in England but with the occasional trip abroad.

I do have intentions of adding lights in the future but will need to save for these a little while longer so will probably need to white balance at first.

I hope this helps mate

 

[mattia_v]

And do you perhaps have a camera already that could be housed easily? I shoot an RX100 with Inon wet lenses in an Acquapazza housing, for now with a single Inon strobe (S2000). It works well, though I do think the newer bodies with better autofocus in protocol at would be a major upgrade. You will want wet lenses to go ultra wide and for proper macro. I don’t do much video personally.

ideally I would house my Sony A7rIII, but that option is a little too rich for the amount of diving I currently do...

 

[Rolo1]

I have a Sony a7riv at the moment but i want to try and keep things separate as I don’t really want to take that camera diving with me......just in case......

 

[Chris Ross]

The 1" sensor compacts are 24mm at the wide end and through a flat port that becomes about 30mm or so - not very wide, you will be well back from wrecks and divers to frame them with all that extra water in between you and the subject. I think you would be well served by a wet wide lens - these are tricky with the newer models as they need to have the camera lens close to the port glass or else you need to zoom in to remove vignetting and so lose all or much that wide angle goodness you paid for, The older 24-70 lenses are better in this regard as they don't get as long at the tele end and you can use a shorter port.

At the least I would think you would want a wet dome to restore the in air field of view to 24mm - wide but not that wide by UW standards. Better to add a wet lens on a swing mount the more basic ones are only corrected to work at the wide end - not zoom through. Something like an INON UWL-H100 which needs to zoom to 28mm and if it doesn't vignette there will give you the field of view of an 18mm lens.

Sony cameras have difficulty white balancing UW with a 10000K limit on colour temperature so are not the best for UW work without filters or lights . The newest RX100 VI & VII are 24-200 lenses so get very long so the ports are long and you have difficulty adding wet lenses to get wider unless you buy a housing with a short port option. Also the camera throws an error in the short port housings if you zoom too far and hit the port and needs to be turned off/on.

Panasonic in theory should be better with a 24-70 equivalent lens and better WB options but I have seen posts where people struggle to get a wet lens to work properly, others where the posted shots look great. Seems to have the best video options.

Canon G7X-III is another option with a 24-70 lens and apparently takes wet lenses well and does a pretty decent job white balancing underwater but executing the WB is a painful 10 button sequence.

I would recommend a housing with a vacuum system option - it pre loads the o-rings and alarms if it loses vacuum - a good safety feature!

Backscatter has a summary review of the options here: Best Underwater Cameras of 2020: Compact Cameras - Underwater Photography - Backscatter they seem to like the Panasonic options noting the LX-100 needs a short port option for a wet wide lens.

 

[Chris Ross]

Some additional info here on wet lenses for the LX-10 - seems that it is fussy about which lens works well and the WWL-C does a much better job (as it should given the high price): The results are in... I finally got into the pool to test these lenses KRL-01 vs UWL-09 Pro

Though it's not clear what aperture the first lot of tests were shot at.

 

[Rolo1]

Thanks for the info everybody, it has been very helpful.

I’m torn between the LX10 and the LX100 at the moment and can’t seem to decide between them.

the biggest deciding factor I need to think about is wet lenses as I’m very new to those. If I just want to film / photograph some nice underwater science and take some images of my buddy etc while below the surface will I be able to get wide enough without any wet lens ? Or will I have to be positioned a huge distance away from him?

 

[Rolo1]

*scenes not science (fat fingers lol)

 

[Chris Ross]

You will be able to take shots without wet lenses and many people do but they will be more or less cloudy or murky. For example a taking a shot of a diver with 30mm focal length - as wide as you can get with a flat port you'll be around 2 metres from a diver that is swimming horizontally and they will more or less fill the frame. If you want to put them in context of the dive site - next to a wreck feature you'll be 4m away or more. 4m away might be "OK" in warm tropical waters but if the visibility is 4-5m it might be a stretch depending on how particular you are about the image quality. Bear in mind that if you plan to add lights you need to be very close to the subject - 1m or so which means a wet wide lens is important.

On the LX-100 it has some nice features but bear in mind you need a short port to effectively use wet lenses which means you are doing wide angle only on that dive with limited ability to zoom.