New Underwater Camera?

We’re going to try out a new underwater camera: the Canon G9. We were planning on renting a housing for Laura’s Rebel XTi, but found out that for the same price as  the rental [or perhaps a little more], we could BUY a great quality pocket camera. So we started looking…

Looking at the old standby, the A series from Canon with which were were so familiar, I shortly realized that the G9 [notice, that’s not an “A”, but a “G”] was brand new and that RAW image support was back in! This was one of our complaints with the S80 – the S70 had RAW capabilites, but the next version did not, nor did the G7. The G9 lists for the same price that the S80 listed for, but due to the vast number of discounts I get for working at Microsoft, I was able to get the camera for $30 less than the best online price.

This is very important for underwater photography for several reasons, but mainly the dynamic range of photos is usually quite different underwater than it is on the surface, so a broader capability in the image format is necessary. RAW is a 12-bit data format, while JPG is 8-bit. The extra 4 bits goes a very long way. This will allow some serious recovery of highlights in what tend to be blown-out pictures [which we saw a lot of with the S80, unfortunately].

Our challenge now will be to both find a decent strobe setup that won’t cost too much and to find the new Ikelite case. I’ll have to make some phone calls for that if I want it to be shipped before we depart on our dive trip.

Oh – and the camera is not only for underwater. It can do everything else, too…