Sea & Sea Digital Camera

McHenry County's Only Full Service Scuba Facility

Photo by Arthur Koch

Photo by Arthur Koch

Photo by Arthur Koch

The DX-1G is the ultimate in compact digital underwater cameras. Whether you like shooting in an automatic mode for great point and shoot pictures or you like to manually choose your settings the DX-1G is perfect for you .

           If there’s a lot of action going on, simple switch to the video mode. Pushing the shutter button starts recording video and pushing it again stops it. The only thing limiting the length of the video is the amount of memory you have. By the end of the week I’d shot over 450 pictures at the highest resolution and filmed about 20 minutes of video all on the same 4 gig SD memory card. I still had room for about 400 more pictures or 15 minutes of video.

            Talk about best of both worlds! Shoot 10 mega pixel pictures that can be zoomed in on to show the finest details or blown up to poster size with no degradation and/or shoot 640 by 30 frame a second video, which is comparable to most digital video cameras. How great is that! I’m amazed by how sophisticated the camera is but how simple it is to use. I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I am with this camera. If you’re in the market for an underwater camera stop by and take a look at the DX-1G from Sea & Sea, you'll be impressed too.

 

For specifications take a look at Sea & Sea’s web site 

           I vacationed for a week in Bonaire using the camera and I was very surprised at how easy it was to use. I started with Sea & Sea’s underwater mode which resulted in some great shots but I wanted to see if I could do better in the manual mode. The perfectly sized buttons and knobs on the housing made changing the camera’s settings easy without making the housing too big. As I played with the settings I was able to save my favorite combination of settings to the camera’s “my settings 1” and “my settings 2”. Now with just a turn of the knob I’m able to switch between my two most useful settings combinations. I set up “my setting 1” for macro photography and “my settings 2” for wide angle shots.

            Sea & Sea revolutionized underwater photography years ago when they came out with lenses you could change underwater. In keeping with that innovation, the wide angle lens for the DX-1G converts the 24mm camera lens to a super wide 16mm. In seconds you can go from shooting macro to wide angle. In the macro mode the camera will focus as close as 1mm so the only extra lens you’ll need is the wide angle. It conveniently mounts to the lens caddy on the strobe arm when not in use.

Enough said!

           After a couple of dives and a few hundred pictures later, I found I could really improve the quality and dramatic effect of the pictures with a few simple adjustment to the camera’s settings. I also used the YS-110 external strobe to bring out the vibrant colors underwater. It has 13 power levels to choose from and the built-in spotting light allowed me to quickly aim the strobe for perfect lighting.

           Aiming the camera is a snap as well, with its large 2inch by 1 1/2 inch viewer. The viewer can be set up to display no picture, picture only, picture with framing lines, picture with camera settings or picture with settings and a histogram.

           The single biggest complaint photographers have with digital is the shutter lag. With the DX-1G set to the highest resolution there is virtually no shutter lag.

The resolution has been lowered to load faster on all pictures