Grajan
Contributor
But very unlikely to happen. The reasons are commercial not technical.
In the deepwater subsea robotics arena we are increasingly using pressure tolerant electronics immersed in a dielectric oil (that is v cheap BTW). This removes the need for a pressure housing which, at the 10,000'+ we design for, is a BIG deal.
The problem is nobody 'designs' stuff for this pressure so it is pure chance that it works and it often does not. Components have to be qualified, boards have to be designed specifically and all assemblies have to be tested. fortunately most IC manufacturers exclude air for other reasons - capacitors can be a problem. We are currently looking at flash memory to see if it can be qualified. You would just plug in to a firewire port to get the images - no card changes.
So we (may) have the electronics - the mechanics are fine -what about the optics? Apparently not impossible. The image stabilization system for the Canon cameras and binoculars is based on a fluid immersed optical path.
BUT and it is a very big but. This is not going to work for an off the shelf camera. There are going to be dozens of air inclusions in things like lens couplets etc. Why? Why not? You design for purpose. Unfortunately the market is way too small to design to this purpose.
We are happy to pay large sums of money for highly specialized gear (and we have not immersed a camera - yet). The scuba industry is not - I am talking LOTS of zeros here.
There is more info on pressure tolerant electronics here.
And more on oil based optics here.
.
In the deepwater subsea robotics arena we are increasingly using pressure tolerant electronics immersed in a dielectric oil (that is v cheap BTW). This removes the need for a pressure housing which, at the 10,000'+ we design for, is a BIG deal.
The problem is nobody 'designs' stuff for this pressure so it is pure chance that it works and it often does not. Components have to be qualified, boards have to be designed specifically and all assemblies have to be tested. fortunately most IC manufacturers exclude air for other reasons - capacitors can be a problem. We are currently looking at flash memory to see if it can be qualified. You would just plug in to a firewire port to get the images - no card changes.
So we (may) have the electronics - the mechanics are fine -what about the optics? Apparently not impossible. The image stabilization system for the Canon cameras and binoculars is based on a fluid immersed optical path.
BUT and it is a very big but. This is not going to work for an off the shelf camera. There are going to be dozens of air inclusions in things like lens couplets etc. Why? Why not? You design for purpose. Unfortunately the market is way too small to design to this purpose.
We are happy to pay large sums of money for highly specialized gear (and we have not immersed a camera - yet). The scuba industry is not - I am talking LOTS of zeros here.
There is more info on pressure tolerant electronics here.
And more on oil based optics here.
.
