Sony a6400 strobes and housing

[Cdunk]

Hello everyone,
Recently I purchased the song a6400, currently I am looking to get more into diving underwater freediving and also scuba diving. I have looked into many housings and the nauticam and Fantasea housings look like you can’t get them anywhere anymore and concerning the seafrogs from reviews and other posts on this I will most likely stay away due to wanting to dive deep and not wanting any leaks or damages or performance issues which seem to regularly happen, so ikelite it is. I am wondering does anyone have any experience with the Sony a6400 + ikelite housing I am looking to get the sigma 10-18 f2.8 as I would want a wide f-stop due to dark conditions I will be diving in mainly in Scotland. And also what are people’s recommendations for strobes for this setup I understand you can purchase ttl converters but these are slightly out my price budget, fibre optic cables will probably be the best bet but I still don’t fully understand how strobes work. For instance do you need a ttl converter to use ttl on your strobes or can you use ttl with fibre optic and is just a performance decrease? So any recommendations on strobes for this setup would much be appreciated and how they would work?

Thankyou very much for any replies.

 

[Nemrod]

I have a Nauticam NA6400, been using it now for going on five years. The A6400 is typical of A series cameras. Yes, you can shoot sTTL with optical cables. It works wonderfully with the A6400.

I have not had good success with the expensive Underwater Technics trigger. I cannot recommend that at this time. However, the A6400 has decent battery life even with using the built in strobe to trigger either manual or sTTL.

For strobes I am using the Inon S220s after my old D2000 strobes went on the fritz. If your conditions are dark you will find a dearth of affordable powerful strobe options. Until Inon releases their new ZXXX there just is not much I can recommend under $1,000. The YSD3 perhaps, the chunky, heavy, powerful Backscatter strobe. The S220 strobes actually work well for close up work and high lighting CFWA but you are not going to light up an entire reef with the little things.

Ikelite housings work fine, kind of full of bent pieces of coat hanger wire and rubber stoppers for controls and would make a bread box jealous of the square box shape, but they work. They do not support optical strobes (without adding additional gizmos), they do not have full access to all controls. Ikelite should move into the 21st Century and quit hawking the same old same old.

When purchasing an UW camera rig, the first thing to do is to see what cameras are there housings offered for and which might fall in your price range and accomplish your goals. Then buy the camera. There may be a Sony Nauticam NA6400 in the waterpixel forum classifieds (no, not mine).

 

[Cdunk]

Thanks for the advice and haven't seen one for sale until now.
For that housing it comes with the Zen 170mm glass dome port, would there be much distortion when using a rectilinear lens such as the sigma 10-18mm f2.8. And would it fit? I have not found any port charts for the model but was wondering if anyone might know or at least how to find out.