Introduced at the beginning of the year, this Liquid Image underwater mask with built-in digital camera is now available in Japan for approx $120. No idea if or when this might be coming to other countries.
It features a 3 or 5 Mp CMOS sensor, LCD screen, 16MB of memory, MicroSD card slot (up to 2GB), a USB port, takes 2560×1920 resolution images, and records VGA resolution video at 25fps.
The problem with most underwater camera housings, besides potential flooding, is the eye piece. The standard viewfinders usually don’t magnify the image and usually reduce the image size so you can see the corners and picture data on DSLRs.
See example below:
This is a pain as you can’t critically focus the image and most of the time are left to just guess on the composition and framing. And compounding all this, you are wearing a mask between the eye piece and your eye. Sometimes you get very lucky and get the shot, other times need to have Mr Photoshop help you fix those images or get out focused, poorly framed pictures that you just end up deleting.
Some very high-end manufacturers have started to build larger non-vignetted eye pieces for their housing but that’s not an option if you are already invested in your camera/housing combo.
Not anymore, Backscatter a specialty underwater imaging company in Monterey has modified two off-the-shelf eye pieces from Inon that bolt onto almost any underwater housing. There eye-pieces extend the eyepoint without changing image size in viewfinder so that 100% of camera’s finder image is seen without any vignetting, even underwater with a mask.
Backscatter has the Inon 45, macro/wide angle and the Inon Straight Viewfinder, which is designed for fast moving wildlife. Both are available now, $900 each.
