Questions about the PT-058...

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GirlonFire

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Location
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Hello all, I am setting up my new rig and I have some questions about the Olympus PT-058 housing...

1.Do you remove, clean and grease the o-ring after every dive as the manual says?
2.Do you use the silica gel bag/dessicant pack in the housing? How often do you need to replace it? It only comes with 5.
3.Have you had an issue with a red reflection coming off the red lens port? Backscatter recommends either a step-up ring or to black it out with a sharpie or tape. If going the sharpie route, exactly which part of the red port do you black out? The outermost circle? At 9:07 of the video:

Thank you!
 
1. service the o-ring after each time you open the housing to change the battery or access the images.you need to at least dry up any water drops clinging to the o-ring when you open it up to prevent that water causing fogging later on.
2. the dessicant is stop fogging by absorbing moisture - you need to keep it sealed in bag like a ziplock between uses it just keeps absorbing atmospheric water vapour until it is spent. Maybe a bit of trial and error to find out when it's spent, in tropical humid weather it could happen quite quickly. I found even in Indonesia where the air was very humid, my daughter's TG-4 Oly housing didn't fog, where it might is taking from a humid place into cold water. This can be addressed by only opening it in an air conditioned room pre dive so the humidity in the air trapped inside is low.
3. I would do all the port, the ring acts to stop light reaching, the ring and is probably the neatest solution and would only cost a few $.
 
1. Ha ha ha. I've done it once in 50 dives with zero problems - well unless you count the time I got the lens cap string caught in the seal and flooded it

2. Have changed it once after the flooding incident. Did have a few issues in the Philippines but it was REALLY humid

3. Never been a problem for me, but I'm not running a strobe really close.
 
The only times I have ever flooded cameras are after I have removed and regreased the o ring.

So now , after every trip , I do a full clean of the inside and outside of the housing , remove and clean the o ring and then put a small quantity of silicone on the ring just so that it is moist the whole way around. I did put too much on once and that resulted in water ingress. But the beauty of the TG series is obviously that the camera itself is waterproof.
 
It depends on where you are diving, if it's Lembeh strait with fine sand everywhere you might want to service it more often. One of the issues I get with O-rings is the water drops clinging to them, you want to try to get the thing closed without getting the water drops inside. Won't hurt the camera in your case but makes fogging a real possibility.
 
Do you use a video light? That’s what I have. A bigblue vl4200p.
I'm just using a Mares 1500 lumen dive light (hand held at the moment). Tossing up buying a video light or a strobe, but not in any real hurry - trying to resist my rig getting bigger and bigger
 

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