Dive camera

The Sealife Ecoshot is a tank of a 6 mega pixel digital camera. It can withstand a 6 ft (2 m) drop and can be submerged to 75 ft (23 m) while still being fully capable of taking high quality pictures. It features a 4x digital zoom which is nice in one regard because it doesn’t make noise and doesn’t change the dimensions of the camera, but at the same time, the picture quality tends to suffer.

The Sealife Ecoshot is loaded with all sorts of features that the casual photographer will more than likely overlook. You can change brightness, contrast, picture resolution, picture quality, take videos, take shots at predetermined intervals without being around the camera, and of course, the coolest feature by far, you can take pictures under water. The camera automatically adjusts the tint of the image to negate the typical blue or green tint you would get in any other underwater picture. When you use this mode on land, all of your pictures will come out with a red tint.

There are also accessories galore such as different lenses, lights, external flashes, etc. but the casual photographer won’t need to bother with these. Despite the fact that the external flash is an extra accessory, the camera also has a built in flash. The professional photographer or documentary film maker on the other hand would need these accessories.

The camera itself runs on a pair of AA batteries, which aren’t hard to come by and also come in rechargeable variants. So you won’t have to spend an extra $30-$100 on a specialty Lithium Ion battery or anything fancy like that. Just a pair of AA’s is all you need.

The camera has 16Mb of internal memory, which fills up quickly when shooting high resolution, high quality shots. Using the highest setting for resolution and quality (Fine 2816 x 2112) you can fit 3 pictures in the internal memory. Thankfully, the camera is also compatible with SD flash cards up to 1Gb. Using the same resolution and quality, you can fit close to 300 pictures in a 1Gb card. 300 pictures may not seem like many, but trust me, when you take them off the camera and rename all of them to something more useable, trust me, 300 pictures is a LOT.

For those of you who like having lots of buttons on your camera, the Sealife Ecoshot will be quite a disappointment to you. It only has 7 buttons total. Because it has so few buttons, it would seem that the camera would be easy to operate. WRONG. This is one of the least intuitive camera’s I’ve ever handled. The power button is also the zoom button. That can be somewhat irritating at times because you have to press the zoom button to zoom in, but if you hold it down for too long, the camera shuts off. Plus, there are menus upon menus. Thankfully, the manual is not only helpful, but to the point.
You can access the online manual here:
www.sealife-cameras.com/service/manuals.html


As far as underwater cameras (that are affordable to the average person and not just the Discovery Channel or the BBC) go, the Sealife Ecoshot takes some really nice pictures IF you configure all the settings right. The camera has an “auto” setting that is supposed to optimize all adjustments (brightness, contrast, sharpness, etc.) for you, but it rarely pans out that way. You’re better off spending about two days learning the camera’s capabilities and how to properly adjust the settings yourself. The manual does a good job of explaining HOW to do this, but as for WHEN to use certain settings, you really just need to play around with the camera.