Interview with Howard Rosenstein from Fantasea Line at PHOTOKINA 2004

digideep.com:
Howard, please introduce yourself and your company.

Howard Rosenstein:
Well, I have about 35 years of diving experience, as a diver, instructor or underwater photographer. Fantasea Line distributes, among other things underwater housings, mainly for the Nikon Coolpix. We try to get to the more popular, lower end of the market. There is a lot of competition at the top end of the market, but we used our resources and contacts with very capable people, working around the Hong Kong area, to popularize underwater digital photography. Our first attempt was the CP-4 housing for the Coolpix 4300. We kind of blew away the market by having a 40 meter depth housing for 130 or 180 dollars - depending on the model you choose - including insurance against flooding. I think it contributed a lot to the popularity of underwater photography, because this made it quite accessible to many people, who may not have thought about it until that point. So the idea is to make a dependable product. We have confidence in it. We insure the cameras, we don't even sell them, but we insure them. If someone loses the camera because of flooding, he or she gets a new camera. We have confidence in our products.

How do get into diving and underwater photography?
That is kind of a fun story. I started my diving career actually as a young man growing up in California cleaning swimming pools a long, long time ago. But soon after that I went to Israel. Because of opportunity and faith I ended up opening probably the very first diving center in Sharm El Sheik [Sinai, Egypt] in 1971. Because I was there and many others were not, I had the opportunity to meet some impressive and outstanding people who came to do stories about Sharm. In 1972 a very young underwater photographer by the name of David Doubilet got his first assignment for National Geographic Magazine. Since then he became maybe the most famous underwater photographer in the world. I was his guide in Sharm El Sheik and I took him around. It ended up being a cover story for National Geographic. I did not have a camera then, but he had about ten with him and he said, why don't you just take a camera and start taking pictures from me. So I had the benefit of learning from a very talented and capable photographer with all the film I wanted to use. And by chance one picture that I took with his camera ended up on the cover of the "camera 35" magazine in the United States. And I said, now that is easy: you jump into the water, take a picture and get 500 dollars for a cover photograph. This is great! Well, it was the last picture I sold for the next 30 years, but they gave me the feeling, you can really do something with underwater photography.

What was your best photo-dive? Was it digital or on film?
Well, I have to make a confession: I have been taking underwater photos for over 30 years, but I only bought a digital camera one and a half year ago, so most of my diving and underwater photography-history is analogue. I have been totally blown away by the digital uw-photography. I have not bought a film since then. I believe so much in that medium. But from my history, David and I did about 9 feature stories for National Geographic in 35 years, the last one was in the Seychelle Islands in the Aldabra-Atoll where I used to own a liveaboard boat called “Fantasea”. It was one of the most incredible, beautiful, untouched, pristine uw-sceneries you can photograph. It is really hard to tell, I do not want to exaggerate, but there are thousands of dives I have taken, almost all in the Red Sea, where I lived and worked for so many years. I could not point out one dive and say, this was the best. Maybe the first time I dived with a Mola Mola on the reef and had the opportunity to take some great shots, maybe the first whale shark. I really do not know, there are to many good stories to tell here.

What digital camera do you recommend right now?
We work primarily with the [Nikon] Coolpix line, and I think the most recent Coolpix starting with the 3200, the 4200 and the 5200 are wonderful optical products, they have wonderful lenses. They are small, compact and you get really great results. So we made the CP-3 and the CP-5 housing and an accessory system for these three models. I think the price from $250 to $400 dollars for the camera is very competitive and our housings are available at $150 to $160 dollars. So, those are pretty good choices for the beginners. Of course, you get good pictures out of the water too, so that are the ones I currently recommend.

Are there any other brands, other than Nikon, for which you considered making housings?
Yes, we considered a few brands. We are basically looking for products that do not have their own housings. It does not make sense for us to make housings for Olympus, Canon or Pentax. These guys have their own labels for uw-casings. Panasonic has some cameras that do not have housings. We were also looking at some Casio products. But right now the main business outside of Nikon is to get some OEM-products, some inexpensive, good digital cameras that do not have well known names and to make housings for them and put it under the Fantasea label. There is some really good stuff available. You are paying a premium for big brand names. But you can find really good products without big names that make good pictures. And the prices are really attractive. We are considering products in the 4 and 5 megapixel range with a housing for $300 or $350.

Did you know that only 308 of our 588 products in the digideep.com database are served with at least one uw-housing, which means more than 42 percent remain un-served. Also, you have strange incidents like 8 to 15 manufacturers going for the D100 or the D70. What do you think you can do to position yourself in this market?
Well, the uw-photography market is controlled by the same rules as other markets. I know it can be frustrating for a guy who just got a Pentax for Christmas and can't find a housing. But it is a pretty big investment to create a housing for a camera: the tooling costs, assembly costs, engineering costs, the injection costs … As a housing manufacturer, you need a certain guaranty on the success of your investment. One of the inherent problems of the digital world is that it has very little short product life-cycles. In other words: A new digital camera is introduced and 6 months after that it is trashed. But it takes at least 6 months to get a project going on a housing. If you make a small modification, it is not a big deal. I would love to make as many different housing models as possible, but you have to be a businessman here. Also you have to get some insider information. Take Nikon for example: Sometimes they are planning to reuse an existing camera body, like they did with the Coolpix 885 and the 4300. So that is great for us, because they extend our product life-cycle. It is a very tricky business.
The technology is moving so quickly and superseding itself almost on a yearly basis. There is also keen competition. You have to be fast but conservative, because when you go the wrong avenue here, you lose $20.000 to $30.000, which is hard to regain. We try to find out, where the market, Nikon or the OEM-products are heading. And within our capability we try to see what we can get out of it fast. You know there are companies like Ikelite, which basically build a box, a shell with some holes in it for handling, which is legitimate. I think, they are doing a great job to popularize underwater photography. We are trying to move in that direction but with the intention to cut costs and maybe to make it a little smaller and more stylish

Where at Photokina 2004 can I take a look at your products? At the Nikon booth?
Well, at the last Photokina they were all over us, because we were the first ones to put Nikon Coolpix housing on the market with a competitive price. But since then, perhaps partially because of our success with the CP-4 and the CP-3 that followed, they decided to come out with their own lower end housing. That is legitimate, my biggest customer is Nikon. I sell to 15 national Nikon distributors around the world, so they still appreciate our price point and our contribution.

Tell us about your experiences with other companies besides Nikon. Do they show interest in uw-housings?
Well, you have to separate between the ones that are already involved in this market, having their own housings out and the rest. We did not even waste our time [with that], because we thought, they were already logged in. So we basically approach the companies, that do not have housings for their cameras yet. They all understand that this is a tool to help them sell their cameras. [But] to be honest, none of them loses much sleep over it. U/W-photography is really important in our lives, but it is a very small element in the overall photographic world. We spoke to Casio and prototyped a housing for them, we also spoke to HP [Hewlett Packard]. We were actually in a bid to get a big contract with them. We talked to Samsung. Everybody is nice and curious about it, but the Japanese companies especially would love to have their products produced in Japan. Basically we finance our work and market the product. And when it is symbiotic with the needs of the company, they will support us in promotion, but that is all. Nikon did not give us one penny for developing or manufacturing these housings. They said, get the product and if we like it, we buy it - fortunately they did. They bought thousands and thousands of them, which is ok. But we have to finance our own operations and take the risk.

After looking around at this Expo, which camera do you recognize as worthy of becoming hosted in one of your housings?
Well, it is my first day at the show. So I can only refer to the things I have seen on the internet, the new Coolpix for example. But we are making a housing for the Nikon D70, which was introduced not here but at the PMA-Show, and I am really exited about that. I hope that it will make a lot of noise on the market. I know about the Coolpix 8400 and the 4800, which might be really good cameras for macro, because they have very good macro-lenses. What we would like to do is to make a housing for that group of cameras, which is similar to the Canon Pro1 and the new 8800, 8700 and 5700 Coolpix cameras. After that we will have finished the project on the D70, it is the next direction we are going to. And perhaps we could get into the Coolpix 8400 as well, we have to take a closer look at it.

Can you tell us something about the price range of your brand new D70 housing?
To be honest I can not tell you a price right now. The work is still in progress and we want to add a few features. We are looking for an easy-to-use-housing for this wonderful uw-camera. We want to have it on the market for less than $1.000, including lens port and insurance for the camera in the housing. The question is how much under $1.000 can we do it.

Maybe you can tell us about some new features of the housing?
Well, we are concentrating our efforts on developing a new system that is able to support its own strobes and arms. We are definitely looking in the direction of a wireless communication with the SB800 and the SB600 strobes from Nikon. We are developing housings for these strobes now.

That sounds very interesting. Howard, thank you for your time and this wonderful interview.

Interview by Andreas Voeltz