Hey everybody well I had a bit of bad luck this weekend and lost my camera to a flooded housing. Well I guess somebody thinks I needed to upgrade. Problem is I haven’t looked at cameras in a while. I was shooting a Olympus C-770 UZ. in a Olympus housing. With a sea and sea Yx-90 Ds strobe. The camera is kinda old so it probably would be better to just get a new one.  The only ones I know of is the Canon G-9 but there’s no wide angle lens for it and I really think having a wide lens this time would be good. And the Olympus 560 ultra zoom. I just haven’t seen many reviews on this camera,and I know I don’t need that much lens underwater. So my question is what would all of you recommend, I have to have manual controls, Wide angle would be great and I would like to be able to use my strobe, that shouldn’t be a problem I have been shooting that in manual with the C-770. I would like to try to stay under a $1000 for everything. I probably should buy a housing for my Nikon D-80 but after what happened I’m kinda scared to take that underwater. plus I like the smaller housings. So Recommendation would be greatly appreciated. Oh and any recommendations on where to buy it would be great to, I live in Guam and you can’t get anything good out here for a good price. Thanks for any help.

Sorry to hear of the demise of you camera. 

If you get the Ikelite housing for the G9 with the optional short lens port, you can fit Inon or Epoque wide angle adapters.  The short port does limit the maximum telephoto zoom you can use in the housing though, not that this should be a problem underwater where wide is more important.

Oly 560 ultra zoom sounds like it will probably also pose difficulties in getting wide angle adapters - in the main, ultra zooms are physically long lenses, needing long ports, which make using wide angle adapters difficult.

If wide angle is a goal, then perhaps you could start by looking at the Inon website (link) which lists all the cameras that they provide adpaters for.  This can then form your shortlist.

I would suggest you look at the Canon Powershot A640, which was compared favourably to the G9’s predecessor, the G7, and retails at a much lower price, but there’s no Inon WA adapter for it… :-(

Good luck in your search.
Graham

Thanks for the reply I will check out the Inon website, for the wide angle lenses. So who uses inkelite housings? Any problems with them . Them only problem I see with the short lens port is I do alot of Kayking too and it would be nice to be able to use the long lens too. One other question doesn’t the oly 560 already have a 27mm lens. My only problem is I don’t know about image quality through that long range. Well any advice would be well recieved thank you Nate.