I am expecting a new baby

[Jules]

my olympus c7070 arrives this week, according to the nice man I ordered it from. The housing is coming next week...

Shiney! new toys ...

mmmmmmmmmmm

[Cussy]

Congratulations on the new arrival. I hope your little Oly gives you as much pleasure as mine does. I found the transition from the C4000 to C7070 very easy, in fact I've only had to look at the manual once or twice, so you should take to it easily.
Rob
PS coincidentally my son is actually called Ollie, alas his middle name isn't 7070

[TimIngmire]

Mmmmmm, New toys.......

Mmmmmm, Shineeyyyy.

[Jules]

5 hours for the battery to charge up... can see another battery being first thing on the shopping list, after awacking great CF card.

So far looks good though, everyone in the office is sick of me sitting in the corner saying "precioussss" and taking too many pictures of them working...

I had a play with the scene settings last night. There are two specifically for underwater "underwater wide" and "underwater Machro" I couldnt get the machro one to focus very well on the bunch of keys I was using to test it. The manual helpfully suggests that you only use these two with the underwater housing!

so still have to wait for the housing, hoping it will arrive next week ..

[Cussy]

Batteries are dead cheap from eBay. Big cards are all fairly evenly costed, I got mine from Amazon in the end.

I tried the 2 scenes underwater - useless. Set your own up in My Scenes using useful settings. The scenes might be ok for the Red Sea or alike.

Macro on shiny objects, set the focus to spot focusing if there is plenty of light.

One function on the camera has been baffling me. Under Accessaries you can tell the camera you are using an underwater housing. Anyone got any idea what this actually does?

It's a nice camera........

Rob

PS Have you insured this one?

[Paul Sharman]

HI,
My 5060 had the setting for a housing.
As far as i could see it did not seem to make any difference at all!
Sorry but no idea what it actually dose!!
Cheers.
Paul.

[Cussy]

Jules
Check out Scan's Today Only site for cheap Compact Flash:
http://www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/
The offer runs out Sunday (11th September).
Rob

[dave s]

Hi Rob,

The setting for underwater camera is to be used when you have a different lens fitted.
Its in the advanced manual somewhere.

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Jules,

Ref the battery, it doesn`t have a memory so you can charge it after any use.
Mine normally takes an 1 - 2 hours to charge after an 80min dive.

Hope you are having fun with your new toy.

[Jules]

well I got two spare batteries (20 quid each) and a 2Gb ultrafast CF card (sandisk extreme III), but i am really struggling with the focus on machro modes.. it seems to go past it being in focus to make it out of focus again. Had a fair degree of sucess with the manual focus but thats a bit faffy!

Anyhow the housing is watertight... it's been for it's first dive today. 5 minutes at 1m , water temp 39 degrees c... well i was getting in the hot tub anyhow to soak away the muscle ache from yesterdays climbing and it seemed sensible! No bubbles and no leaks.

I took some pics using RAW, even on my super fast card it takes about 5 seconds to write to the card. I have to set to take both a JPEG and RAW for each one. The file sizes are huge though , the RAW one is 10.4Mb and the JPG SHQ is 4.5Mb but it can 127 pics like that before the card is full . If I take the SHQ on it's own it takes just over second to write and RAW on it's own takes slightly less than 4 seconds.

I am off to the Farnes next weekend so i will try out various settings including the RAW. I will of course post my pics warts n all so that you can see how much better they are this time next year! )

jules

[Norseman]

Congrats pixiewixie.

- Do not attempt going SHQjpeggy on the Farnes trip. RAW is the only option. Anything to do with Jpegged pictures is a dead end, since you loose out on so many options when it comes to PS afters. That's my experience anyway.
- I think the accessory option does something with the light measurement. I ended up with one less F-stop when using the wide angle all of a sudden. Not sure though.
- I have found that it's very very very important to choose spot focus and not the iESP when doing macros. Otherwise you'll end up with the camera measuring all over the screen and choosing the "least resistance", meaning it'll grab the background. I think.

Kyrre