Sea & Sea DX-1G review (aka Ricoh GX100)

Since the death of my Fuji F810, I’ve been looking at a way to get some decent underwater photos. Kitting out my Canon 350D/Rebel for underwater use would cost a huge stack of cash – $1200 for a housing, $400-700 for a wide angle lens, $200-400 for a wide angle port. The idea of a package that bulky didn’t sound great either. I’ve also been looking for a decent wide angle compact digital camera with plenty of manual options for a while now. The Sigma DP1 looks great, but has been missing in action – turns out they are reworking the design again. That leaves only one game in town, Ricoh’s GX100. This fall Sea & Sea brought out their version of the GX100 with a waterproof case and called it the DX-1G. I finally took the plunge.

At $1000 for the camera + underwater housing package, the price was a steeper than I was expecting. Sea & Sea seems to be engaged in a bit of profiteering, charging about $100 more for their version of the camera than Ricoh does. The camera badge is different of course, and they have added some underwater scene modes, but other than that, it seems to be an exact match. In fact, Sea & Sea kind of screwed up the firmware, it doesn’t seem to register its name properly in metadata, or that’s a bug in Adobe’s system.

The camera size is quite nice – just barely thin enough to fit in my jeans front pocket. The 24 mm lens is great for me; I really love the wider angle. Zoom isn’t super, but that’s to be expected on a lens this wide. The build quality is OK for a consumer camera, but there are slight wobbles and oddities that shouldn’t be there on a camera at this price point. The manual controls are good, once you get used to their function button. It lets you set up your own custom modes, which are a nice touch. Battery life seems good, but I wish the camera was able to charge via USB, that would be one less thing to bring. Fortunately, the charger is small, so it isn’t a big issue.

Quality wise, let’s get this out of the way, 10 MP is a joke. This sensor should be more like 6 or 8 MP. This would have meant smaller file sizes (with quicker write times), less noise and more clarity. Apparently they felt they needed to compete in the megapixel wars, even though I would assume this camera is only a viable purchase for someone that is aware MP numbers are misleading. That said, with enough manual attention, it can put out some decent shots. Not at the same quality as my SLR, but I don’t think anyone expects that. The small sensor means you can find noise at anything over 100 ISO. If you really pixel peep, you can even find noise at 100 and 80. However, the noise looks slight film grain, and isn’t unpleasing to me.

This certainly is not the camera to use in super low light conditions, but anti-shake and f2.5 let me do quite a bit with it. In fact, I think it will be rare for me to use the higher ISO modes, I can get away with much lower ISO numbers compared to my SLR. For example, with its smaller sensor and lens, the DX100/DX-1G (5.1 mm) has an infinite depth of field at 6 feet with f2.5. For similar depth of field on my 350D Rebel (17 mm), I would need f9. The DX100/DX-1G can get everything in focus at a much lower ISO than my 350D Rebel – up to 4 or 5 stops. This means a lot of my ISO criticisms don’t matter quite as much for that type of photography. However, the same depth of field effect goes the other way as well. I can no longer pick out a subject and get nice bokeh, other than close and macro shots. Considering the majority of my photos are wide angle and large DOF, this is a drawback I can handle.

Exposure and focus are sort of a mixed bag. Underwater macro focus can be slow, but a full press quick focus usually works quite well above or under action shots. The camera seems to over expose by +.5 to +1.3 stops. This means I usually have it set to -1 EV in bright sun, and sometimes -1.3 underwater. Shutter speed can be an issue in bright light if you want to use f2.5. I’ve found that if the total shutter speed for the exposure with -1 EV included is greater than the camera’s shutter speed limit of 2000, it tends to just shoot at 0 EV, rather than try the quickest speed available. This is annoying, the camera would have probably benefited from ISO 50.

What is harder to handle is the RAW write time, which runs about 4 seconds. The DNG raw files are about 14 MB, and it writes a 2 MB JPG at the same time. This camera is screaming for a decent memory buffer. Memory is cheap; I don’t know why they didn’t add it. RAW files themselves are great, and hold lot of detail in the files that is wiped out by the JPG conversion. The RAW files are also essential for shooting underwater – the deeper you go, the more you lose red and other colors. Though the white balance actually isn’t too bad, adding some tint or doing custom white points in the RAW file really help to work around the effects of a screwy color space.

Sea & Sea’s DX-1G housing seems to be well made, though the back screen window does seem to scratch a bit easy for my tastes. Layout and operation is all pretty decent, and I enjoy using it underwater. I’m not sure who thought it was a good idea to make the case a dark colored; I would think it would heat up in the sun and promote fogging when you hit the cold water. Though I have yet to have that happen to me – I’ve been using old desiccants, and the housing still hasn’t fogged up on me. The size is nice, small enough to stuff in a large BC pocket if I don’t want to have it in my hands when I start the dive.

The internal flash is pretty pitiful for underwater use; I’d say a strobe is a necessary purchase for anything at significant depth, in lower light, or if 100% true colors are required. In low light you would also probably benefit from a focus light as well. I have no intention to run out a drop a bunch of money on a strobe & arm kit, so I’m tempted to rig up a LED flashlight as a ghetto focus/constant light for deeper use. Something sort of like ULCS’s tray with a spotting light adapter. That way I could use my alternate light source as a focus/video light. Not really sure if that would actually get decent results, but it is worth a try considering the cost and bulk of strobes.

Long story short, the camera has draw backs, but I still like using it.

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Galleries with photos taken by my Sea & Sea DX-1G (aka Ricoh GX100):
– 2007.10.25-29 New Orleans
– 2007.10.23 San Diego fires
– 2007.10.21 Ocean Beach surf and smoke
– 2007.11.02-03 Two Harbors, Catalina Island

Underwater photos:
– 2007.11.02-04 Scuba diving and snorkeling Catalina Island
– 2007.11.24 Scuba diving Islas Coronado
– 2008.02.02-14 Big island underwater
– 2008.04.11-13 Two Harbors, Catalina

Scuba diving with sea lions on Islas Coronado

sea lions wreck sea lion
Photos of Scuba diving Islas Coronado, Baja

I had a great time scuba diving at the Lobster Shack on Islas Coronado on Saturday. The Coronado Islands are a group of four islands in the municipality of Tijuana. An hour boat ride from San Diego, they are a popular dive spot. There is usually a bit of heart break regarding gill nets and over harvesting of certain species, but the islands are resilient, and still attract birds, fish, and sea mammals. It was chilly, but the visibility was over 40 feet, and there was a ton of California Sea Lions that wanted to play. We were the first off the boat, and immediately swarmed by about 30 playful sea lions. Some just bit and wrestled with each other near us, others came to play in our bubbles, or blow bubbles in our face while zooming by. One was curious enough to try chewing on Mani’s hood and mask. We explored the wreck, the rocks, and algae, always accompanied by at least two sea lions. It was a fantastic dive.

Untergunther cleared over charges from fixing the Panthéon’s clock

The Guardian has good news on the fascinating Untergunther group in Paris:

Four members of an underground “cultural guerrilla” movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France’s cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument…

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.

But the UX, the name of Untergunther’s parent organisation, is a finely tuned organisation. It has around 150 members and is divided into separate groups, which specialise in different activities ranging from getting into buildings after dark to setting up cultural events. Untergunther is the restoration cell of the network.

More Baja links

– The string of events the past few weeks in Baja seems to have attracted a lot of country wide attention.

– News bits like this don’t seem to help the situation: Kidnapped Spanish tourist found blindfolded beside Tijuana road

– You just can’t make up news this bizarre:

A mysterious helicopter crash during Baja California’s storied Baja 1000 off-road race set off a strange chain of events that left four people dead and two missing after a nighttime raid on a local morgue, officials said Thursday.

…Among the last-minute entries were two men who registered a black pick-up truck called Azteca Warrior, according to media reports and Ensenada city spokesman Daniel Vargas. One of the men, registered as Pablo Gonzalez, was tracking the race team’s progress in a helicopter (60 miles west of the city of Ensenada ) when it crashed into high-tension wires, killing Gonzalez and another passenger and injuring two pilots.

Two people who said they were relatives of Gonzalez showed up at the morgue Wednesday and tried to claim the body, but were not allowed to take it, authorities said. A few minutes later, the gunmen struck. …The convoy of 14 vehicles pulled up in front of the city morgue on Calle Guadalupe. The attackers stormed the building, snatched a corpse, loaded it into a vehicle and sped off through the hills toward Tecate, where two police officers had set up a roadblock. “They tried to stop them. The gunmen answered with bullets,” said Edgar Lopez, a spokesman for the Baja California state police. …Federal authorities are investigating whether the body is that of drug cartel figure Francisco Merardo Leon Hinojosa, nicknamed El Abulon — The Abalone.

– LA Times has an interesting article about the housing boom by norteamericanos in Baja Sur: Taking Baja South

They arrive by land, air and sea, with visions of the good life dancing in their heads. At first, their numbers are so small as to be barely noticeable. But within a few years they may end up taking over your street, your colonia, practically your entire town. They bring their curious native customs with them—skinny Frappuccinos, “personal watercraft,” wireless Internet access—and replant them in foreign soil. Relentlessly, they remake the landscape in their own image, transforming derelict colonial-era manses into stunning million-dollar homes, and majestic swaths of lonely seaside acreage into $300-per-round golf courses. And though many of them make a diligent effort to learn the local tongue, befriend the natives and blend into their adopted country, others stubbornly resist assimilation: hanging out in their gated compounds with other English-speaking exiles, eschewing the local coffee shops and taco shacks in favor of Starbucks and Burger King, plowing their SUVs like woozy battleships through the narrow streets of picturesque 17th century towns.

A small glimse at your future and past

Wired has a great story about $1000 genetic tests:

Reading your genomic profile — learning your predispositions for various diseases, odd traits, and a talent or two — is something like going to a phantasmagorical family reunion. First you’re introduced to the grandfather who died 23 years before you were born, then you move along for a chat with your parents, who are uncharacteristically willing to talk about their health — Dad’s prostate, Mom’s digestive tract. Next, you have the odd experience of getting acquainted with future versions of yourself, 10, 20, and 30 years down the road. Finally, you face the prospect of telling your children — in my case, my 8-month-old son — that he, like me, may face an increased genetic risk for glaucoma.

The experience is simultaneously unsettling, illuminating, and empowering. And now it’s something anyone can have for about $1,000. This winter marks the birth of a new industry: Companies will take a sample of your DNA, scan it, and tell you about your genetic future, as well as your ancestral past. A much-anticipated Silicon Valley startup called 23andMe offers a thorough tour of your genealogy, tracing your DNA back through the eons. Sign up members of your family and you can track generations of inheritance for traits like athletic endurance or bitter-taste blindness. The company will also tell you which diseases and conditions are associated with your genes — from colorectal cancer to lactose intolerance — giving you the ability to take preventive action.

It is a very interesting read. I’m not really concerned about learning something I didn’t want to know – given the choice, I’d always want to know ahead of time. In fact, I would even be tempted to try out the service, if there weren’t little alarm bells ringing in my head:

…external parties will not be given any of your information without your consent, except as required to comply with legal requirements under applicable laws. Even when we are required to provide information, unless prohibited by law, we will attempt to notify you before providing your information to external parties.

While they won’t be handing out my data, who is to say what legal changes will happen in the next 10-20 years? What other ways would my data be open to mining? Would I be setting myself up for some future liability by gaining information about potential health risks? These questions make me think I would only do it if someone was providing an anonymous test, with no social aspect to their site.