DX1200 HD Review - Part One

This will be my first blog post for the Sea & Sea DX1200 HD camera. I have purchased this set with the wideangle and close-up convertors to shoot 720p HD video underwater.

Normally i use a housed Nikon D300 for underwater photography and specific lenses for the dive. That is 105 or 60mm Micro Nikkors for the macro dives and 10.5mm fisheye for the wreck dives etc.

During those dives i usually suffered from being limited to the lens at hand having a turtle show up during a macro dive or finding a huge school of jacks, barracudas with a 60mm attached.

DX1200 HD is a very compact system certified upto 45mt depth with wideangle and close-up lenses that can be attached/detached underwater, providing the possibility to shoot macro and wideangle in the same dive. The camera is a relabelled Ukrainian ERGO digital, with 12MP packed for photography and 720p HD video at 30fps.


Sea&Sea usually uses Ricoh cameras for its compact range, thus the ERGO choice is somewhat a surprise in this regard. But the camera offers great bang for the buck at a price range of 600 $ for the body & housing.

So, having said all these i also have to say that there are not many reviews for this gear on the net. You can fish out some information at the scubaboard forums. I will test the housing underwater on April 12th in Çeşme in the exploration dives for a new wreck which will be a new artificial reef for the fish and other lifeforms (divers) to breed on :)

Underwater photos and experiences will constitute the second part of the review, bu i had some chance to try out the camera on land and here are the issues that i have faced in my trials and tribulations :

1. The camera supports SDHC cards upto 8GB capacity which is enough for an hour of 720p HD video at 30fps at the superfine resolution. Reducing this resolution to normal will increase the duration to 75 minutes. However, the SDHC card is very important here, when shooting video with a Toshiba 8GB SDHC card, the video jerked every 10 seconds and the on high quality settings the jerking was intolerable. I tried a normal Noname SD card and the video was flawless, thus, try before you buy for some cards are incompatible.


2. There is no manual mode in photography, you can use the program mode and apply some sort of exposure compensation between -2 and +2 EV with 0.5 EV steps, change the white balance and ISO settings.


3. Sea & Sea Mode is mainly for the underwater photography and arranges the white alance to compensate for the loss of colors.


4. Battery life is good for video and normal photography but as soon as you switch the strobe on the battery life decreases drastically. I would recommend to have 2 batteries and 3 SDHC cards for every trip since the battery will last only one dive and so as the SD card.


5. The strobe is fired without the fiber optic card in the macro mode with the accessory shoe arm, which can also support a small video light. I recommend to use the magic filter with this combo to travel lightly though.
6. The housing is very well designed , compact and provides access to all the necessary functions underwater, the red latch locking buttons are a little bit irritating since it is possible to press them accidentally underwater and flood the camera.
7. High ISO performance on land is acceptable, will review it underwater with the magic filter combination.
8. The thread on the close-up lens will probably provide some filters and future additions which is a good sign.

This is so far what i have seen, underwater performance and using tips will hopefully follow in the next posts after the dives.

Take care, Namaste.