jimorus
Registered
G10 and FIX Housing first use.
I recently purchased a G10 and the basic FIX housing. The wide angle port will be added later. It is set up with an S tray and dual ys110 strobes with a FantaSea Nano focus light on a three way ball connector. The focus light sits over the center of the lens. Jack at opticaloceansales.com sold me the tray, arms, a used ys110, the focus light and a pair of generic optical cables for a very reasonable cost and was extremely easy to work with, I received the equipment within 4 days. The housing was from Reef Camera and their assitance was great and shipping nearly matched Jack's.
I was able to try it all out on the Belize Aggressor last week. I missed one dive and ended up with 27. We did the shallows at the Blue Hole. A trip down there 8 years ago was enough for me.
All the gear fit into a laptop backpack along with a small laptop and was carried on the plane. When I get the wide angle something will end up in the checked bag.
The Nano was enough light for night dives and I never really used the modeling lights on the 110s. It was the biggest surprise of all the new equipment. It was inexpensive and performed better than I could have hoped. I will order a spare. My wife did not like me disappearing for a second when the flashes shut down the Nano at night so I will get something small to mount on one of the arms that will stay lit but not add a hotspot to the picture
The housing, camera arms and lights ended up a bit top heavy. It was not enough to be unmanageable for me but my wife felt it was too heavy. I will add some flotation before the next trip. All the pieces worked well together and Jack at Optical Ocean was great to deal with as we discussed what I would need to integrate my current single ys110 strobe into a full dual strobe set up.
The housing is as nice as advertised. The controls operated quite well with one unexpected issue and optical synch cord adaptor is my only complaint. The adaptor for the optical cables has 4 holes with the matching holes set at 180 degrees to each other. To get them set properly over the flash window takes a bit of wiggling around to get both flashes lined up so that they see the light and fire. If the matching holes were at 90 degrees it would line up better. I will redrill them before the next trip. The unexpected issue was that when moving the mode dial underwater it is very easy to change the ISO. For me it is a two handed adjustment. The index finger of one hand holding the ISO still while I twist the mode dial with the other. I only changed between the two custom settings so it was not something I fiddled with too much. The quick access to the remainder of the functions with the buttons was quite easy. I had been concerned with the force necessary to move the control wheel while shooting it above water to familiarize myself with the controls but underwater it was quite manageable. The buttons all operated easily and dependably.
Shutter lag was not as little as with an SLR but it blew my Oly 5060 out of the water. I only had a couple of fish tails rather than 35 to 50%.
I got approximately 250 pictures per battery with forced flash on low and the camera in manual mode and the flash batteries were changed at the same time and did not appear to be ready to fail as they were charging the flash quite quickly. I did run get the red battery light on the 5th dive and shot an additional 30 shots with it flashing, I had the camera set to view the picture for 5 seconds and never ran into a problem with it not functioning because it was writing. I had it set to write RAW and JPEG to 8 gig cards and was getting 4 dives per card.
Now that I am comfortable with everyrthing I will back off on the 5 second view and plan on changing cards and batteries om everything at 4 divesd
All in all I am quite happy with the whole set up.
I recently purchased a G10 and the basic FIX housing. The wide angle port will be added later. It is set up with an S tray and dual ys110 strobes with a FantaSea Nano focus light on a three way ball connector. The focus light sits over the center of the lens. Jack at opticaloceansales.com sold me the tray, arms, a used ys110, the focus light and a pair of generic optical cables for a very reasonable cost and was extremely easy to work with, I received the equipment within 4 days. The housing was from Reef Camera and their assitance was great and shipping nearly matched Jack's.
I was able to try it all out on the Belize Aggressor last week. I missed one dive and ended up with 27. We did the shallows at the Blue Hole. A trip down there 8 years ago was enough for me.
All the gear fit into a laptop backpack along with a small laptop and was carried on the plane. When I get the wide angle something will end up in the checked bag.
The Nano was enough light for night dives and I never really used the modeling lights on the 110s. It was the biggest surprise of all the new equipment. It was inexpensive and performed better than I could have hoped. I will order a spare. My wife did not like me disappearing for a second when the flashes shut down the Nano at night so I will get something small to mount on one of the arms that will stay lit but not add a hotspot to the picture
The housing, camera arms and lights ended up a bit top heavy. It was not enough to be unmanageable for me but my wife felt it was too heavy. I will add some flotation before the next trip. All the pieces worked well together and Jack at Optical Ocean was great to deal with as we discussed what I would need to integrate my current single ys110 strobe into a full dual strobe set up.
The housing is as nice as advertised. The controls operated quite well with one unexpected issue and optical synch cord adaptor is my only complaint. The adaptor for the optical cables has 4 holes with the matching holes set at 180 degrees to each other. To get them set properly over the flash window takes a bit of wiggling around to get both flashes lined up so that they see the light and fire. If the matching holes were at 90 degrees it would line up better. I will redrill them before the next trip. The unexpected issue was that when moving the mode dial underwater it is very easy to change the ISO. For me it is a two handed adjustment. The index finger of one hand holding the ISO still while I twist the mode dial with the other. I only changed between the two custom settings so it was not something I fiddled with too much. The quick access to the remainder of the functions with the buttons was quite easy. I had been concerned with the force necessary to move the control wheel while shooting it above water to familiarize myself with the controls but underwater it was quite manageable. The buttons all operated easily and dependably.
Shutter lag was not as little as with an SLR but it blew my Oly 5060 out of the water. I only had a couple of fish tails rather than 35 to 50%.
I got approximately 250 pictures per battery with forced flash on low and the camera in manual mode and the flash batteries were changed at the same time and did not appear to be ready to fail as they were charging the flash quite quickly. I did run get the red battery light on the 5th dive and shot an additional 30 shots with it flashing, I had the camera set to view the picture for 5 seconds and never ran into a problem with it not functioning because it was writing. I had it set to write RAW and JPEG to 8 gig cards and was getting 4 dives per card.
Now that I am comfortable with everyrthing I will back off on the 5 second view and plan on changing cards and batteries om everything at 4 divesd
All in all I am quite happy with the whole set up.
