New C5060 took a bath

[Ishie]

Well done Ishie!

You will be very pleased with your new housing and will be saving for your strobe in no time. The diffuser will be necessary for now as you may get a shadow from the protruding lens port being so close.

Thanks. I liked the diffuser on the Olympus housing, so I'm hoping I'll be able to get equally good results with the Ikelite before I can afford a strobe. Since you brought it up though, any recommendations for strobe setups? I'm glad that with the Ikelite, it will be easier to mount a strobe, but the packages I've seen with them include synch cables, which I'm not that familiar with. My thrifty nature wants to go with the cheapest strobe setup, but I don't want to make the same mistake with the strobe and spend a lot of money only to waste it to spend a couple hundred dollars more later on what I *really* needed.

I did order some more Ikelite grease and and extra O-ring which set me back a whole $5.

I ordered an extra o-ring because it was cheap. Replacing both Olympus o-rings costs about 20 bucks, which seems excessive, particularly when it looked like I would have to replace them after only four dives.

It's very easy to take the O-ring off, clean, and inspect all surfaces.

And you do that each time, right? The first time I took the Olympus down, I only greased the visible surface of the o-rings instead of taking them out, which I know is a no-no. When I did it the "right" way, *that's* when it flooded.

I would do a submersion test first in a cooler with luke-warm water without the camera in the housing when you get it.

I plan to do all of that too. Had to learn the hard way.

A bummer about the camera mount plate though is that it slightly covers the battery door so you have to physically unscrew the camera from the mount to replace the battery.

Oh, the camera actually screws into place? I didn't know that. Does that make it hard to take the camera out if you're using it for land? Fortunately, despite being 50 bucks, those Olympus batteries last forever! I went through three dives on the same battery and was playing around with settings, all with the LCD on, and it didn't even hit halfway, versus my cheapie Coolpix which sucks a set of AAs in about half an hour.

I can live with that over flooded camera though. For parts and accessories check out:

I grabbed my housing through B&H and they seem pretty good, but the first site seems to have better options for the accessories and the prices are comparable, so...

Thanks again!

 

[Tom Winters]

I flooded a Canon A70 in Provo. I'm not all that thrilled with the way both the Olympus and Canon housing designs fit the o-ring in, but at the price of the hosing, more extensive injection-molding-and-machining just is not going to happen.
Once in place, the o-rings seem to stay pretty well - it's the seating them in really well that is the killer.
Next time you dive with the housing, you are going to experience one awesome pucker factor, bit it will probably be ok. I used to just check and recheck my o-ring before I hopped in - now it's check, recheck, check again, pray to pretty much every deity that's had more than 11 followers since 2447BC, and then hop in.
So far everything has been ok, and I think this is solely due to the tip of the hat to Ka-deh-Hoik-tah, a previously-obscure minor godlet that Assyrians in the Babylonian subdivision of Arcur-do-Whut prayed to briefly. After the Assyrians foolishly moved on to another godlet, the whole subdivision flooded out, killing them all and removing them from recorded history.

 

[Shader]

Thanks. I liked the diffuser on the Olympus housing, so I'm hoping I'll be able to get equally good results with the Ikelite before I can afford a strobe. Since you brought it up though, any recommendations for strobe setups? I'm glad that with the Ikelite, it will be easier to mount a strobe, but the packages I've seen with them include synch cables, which I'm not that familiar with. My thrifty nature wants to go with the cheapest strobe setup, but I don't want to make the same mistake with the strobe and spend a lot of money only to waste it to spend a couple hundred dollars more later on what I *really* needed.


I ordered an extra o-ring because it was cheap. Replacing both Olympus o-rings costs about 20 bucks, which seems excessive, particularly when it looked like I would have to replace them after only four dives.
And you do that each time, right? The first time I took the Olympus down, I only greased the visible surface of the o-rings instead of taking them out, which I know is a no-no. When I did it the "right" way, *that's* when it flooded.

I plan to do all of that too. Had to learn the hard way.

Oh, the camera actually screws into place? I didn't know that. Does that make it hard to take the camera out if you're using it for land? Fortunately, despite being 50 bucks, those Olympus batteries last forever! I went through three dives on the same battery and was playing around with settings, all with the LCD on, and it didn't even hit halfway, versus my cheapie Coolpix which sucks a set of AAs in about half an hour.

I grabbed my housing through B&H and they seem pretty good, but the first site seems to have better options for the accessories and the prices are comparable, so...

Thanks again!

For really understanding the difference between Digital Substrobes and other UW Substrobes I refer you to the Ikelite info page:
http://www.ikelite.com/web_pages/dig_definitions.html
They have a DS-50 for the lower end range which I've seen excellent results. I have a TTL sinc cord for my DS-125 but have heard of people using Sea&Sea and Nikonos strobes utilizing a remote sensor that fires the strobe according to the light sensed from the camera flash. Don't expect any of these solutions to be very cheap though. I have seen some nice results with the DS-50 though.
http://www.ikelite.com/web_pages/substrobe_dig50.html

I usually clean the housing and camera after every use once I am back in my dry room. I have gone a few days though without doing this with no problems, but it is generally good practice to dry off and clean the housing and O-ring after a days diving. You can easily see if there is any grime or grit in the O-ring track. I take the O-ring completely off and clean and then barely grease my clean thumb and first fingertips and gently work the grease into the O-ring without pulling it through my fingers. Doing this after every use really will give you peace of mind and really help the seal and O-ring seat nicely.

Not a problem at all. The camera mounts to a plate on the inside surface of the backside housing piece just like any other tripod screw mounts. Just be a bit careful not to strip the plate threads and screw camera on slowly. After a few times you will find it easy to take on and off for use on land. The batteries seem to last longer on land for me but maybe it's due to Auto-Focusing underwater continously.

 

[slowhands]

My camera died, but I think it was due to condensation rather than flooding. There was no obvious flooding in the Olympus PT-009? case, but my old friend was dead. I was so careful with the O-ring, and it never had a flood, but sadly the camera was kaput. That's the bad news.

The good news it was an old Oly C3040Z and I had an excuse to upgrade, which of course I did (to a 5050, which used same batteries and could use same cards which I had backups on). For better or worse, I went with the Olympus PT-015 case, and so far things are fine. I like the dual O-rings on the door. Been on 60+ dives with it, as deep as 40 meters. So far, all is well.

This was in the Philippines, very high humidity and colder winter water (22-24C). I often could see the case lens fog up when I first went in. I think this is the reason to try the "moisture absorbing pad" idea in the camera case, although silica gel pouches might be better. It would not help a big flood, but for this excess humidity problem maybe it would help.

 

[WhaleCo]

Hello

You Can Glue Ur O Ring In The Bottom Of Groove With A Rubber Compound Or Heavy Grease To Avoid It From Slipping Off While Screwing The Housing.
O Rings Stand Grease Bust Gotto Stay Where They Belong !!!!!!!