Calling Lloyd Bridges

People of a certain age...mine...will understand the title. I was rounding out my trip to Camera Electronic and Wanderlust in Murray Street and the inevitable rush of desire to own new lenses and accessories with a wander down the front cabinets. The underwater cameras seen in this post took my eye - though I didn't want to pester the staff to open the cabinet for a back view. Forgive me my laziness - you'll have to go and do that yourselves. The fronts are pretty, and pretty interesting, and a google of the company's advertising even more so. The little still camera looks pretty basic - reminding us of the first digital cameras of the 1990's - but it contains far more sophistication. That is a fully-sealed camera - you do not need to open it and risk water entry. It will shoot still and video - naturally - but at 16 megapixels and 4K. And with jpeg or RAW. There is an inbuilt facility for three levels of colour correction - remember that underwater is like putting a blue-green filter on your lens and you need to add red or orange to counter it. All done internally The back is ultra-simple, apparently. Three piano keys for video, menu, or playback, plus a sealed LCD screen. You can operate it with gloved fingers and a rising sense of panic as the doom, doom music plays. I've seen the movie, too... The bigger Sport Diver housing is for mobile phones. Here you're trusting a big electronic chunk of money in a big mechanical chunk of money in an environment that seeks to spoil everything. Kind of like going gambling, but with fewer sharks. Nevertheless, to help you out there is a water entry alarm in the housing. It takes standard iPhone and Android devices and is sealed to a greater depth than your courage. The colour correction is a fixed thing; a red filter in front of the viewing window. To complement these two products is a way of getting light into the depths - a Sea Dragon 2500 LED light with a deled battery and the ability to punch out 2500 lumens . It's got three light levels available and quite a wide beam; 120º. This and the red filter will give you bright colour in dim conditions. Divers need not take any other advice from me as I rarely submerge deeper than a tub - they'll know about washing the equipment in plain water and about downloading the images, etc. Down to 60 metres these products are a very good idea, and below that good ideas run out rapidly. My tub is considerably shallower - but it does have a yellow rubber duck.