Why dry..?

[Phaethon]

We all know that most of the problems of scuba diving, from physiology to equipment mechanics, stem from the reliance upon the presence of air and the fact that it differs so greatly in its compressibility compared to water - even to the point where experiments have been carried out into replacing the air in the lungs with highly oxygenated fluids
.
It occourred to me that cameras and their casings would withstand pressure and be less liable to (water) flooding if they were filled with fluid - maybe a light, easily drained, non-conducting oil...

even a generic soft bag would be useable at greater depths because, as I understand it, they can be limited not by resistance to flooding but by external pressure operating buttons.

Of course great care would have to be taken with flooding the camera to exculde all air. SLRs probably wouldn't take too kindly to the denser medium slowing their mechanisms, but digital cameras should be able to live with it - unless I'm missing something...

Have there been any serious attempts to try this - surely it's just a matter of finding the right non-reactive filling fluid, maybe a few changes to camera design to ease flooding and eliminate air from components and perhaps alterations in the optics?

Just some idle throughts from a land-based, non-underwater photographer.

K.

 

[chippy]

Sounds like a fair point, but surely if the "wet housing" leaked and sea water contaminated the liquid, you'd still have the same problem?

 

[TX101]

Have there been any serious attempts to try this - surely it's just a matter of finding the right non-reactive filling fluid, maybe a few changes to camera design to ease flooding and eliminate air from components and perhaps alterations in the optics?
K.

.. and there's the rub. The reason we wear masks is because our eyes need a layer of air between them & the water to work properly. Lenses work the same way - you need a layer of air. In fact, there is air between the different layers of glass in a lens. Im not a lens designer, so I don't know if it's possible to redesign a lens so it will work through water - but I suspect it's either too difficult, too expensive or provides vastly inferior results as Nikon would have already tried it with their Nikonos range..

What I think would be an interesting idea would be a spareair attached to a housing that gets automatically equalised on decent and vented on ascent....

 

[segal3]

I too love getting oil or some other liquid all over my camera, batteries, memory cards, hands, furniture, and other items around my housing...

~Matt Segal

 

[Mo2vation]

It occourred to me that cameras and their casings would withstand pressure and be less liable to (water) flooding if they were filled with fluid - maybe a light, easily drained, non-conducting oil...

It was a vacuum housing. It was an Ikelite housing for an SLR, and basically it had a vacuum valve on it - so the guy loaded in his cam and then hooked the housing up to a vacuum pump... sort of sealing the housing and pulling out all air.

I had never seen one of these before.

K

 

[marpacifica]

What I think would be an interesting idea would be a spareair attached to a housing that gets automatically equalised on decent and vented on ascent....

I was thinking the same thing but last night when I slept I had a dream that the internal flash and other sealed components burst on the pressure changes b/c of a lack of reliefe valve.

Mo2vation-- 10bar, a housing maker based in Hong Kong, makes plastic housings that are good to 300' which seal through a vacuum valve. All that's needed is a slight pull on a valve to create just a little vacuum and that slight pressure change seals the whole deal. No clamps or latches needed.

 

[Bob3]

Hmmm... I had an old housing that had an inflator valve on it, you could squeeze a few PSI into it to help offset the water pressure.

 

[jonnythan]

It's pretty difficult to find a liquid that works with electronic components like circuit boards. The few that do are extraordinarily expensive.

For non-digital cameras, I don't think film will take very kindly to being immersed in any liquids at all. And then, of course, need to drain the liquid completely from the film canister before you got it developed, and fill the new one with liquid before you put it in.

The process would be extremely messy and probably wouldn't even work. Housings work fine, and aren't always that expensive

 

[boney]

Not sure if that would work Jonnythan - but your right in that it would be extremely messy
From what I know - which isn't that much - when taking pics with film it opens up the aperture and a beam of light hits the film capturing the moment. If there was a liquid theres no telling where the light would hit the film and you'd likely get some wierd results.
But I guess this is just an elaboration on a previous point with the optics by TX101.
As for vacuum seals, I believe Bonica has a system called GOALI which is pretty much a thingy that sucks the air out... much like a vacuum

 

[H2Andy]

ok, phaeton, so your idea is to make a camera fluid-resistant, submerge it in fluid,
and thus protect it from... some other fluid?

wink

why not just make the thing fluid resistant enough to take on the second fluid
without need of the middle-man fluid, as it were?