Sea & Sea DX1200-HD Review Part Two

Sea&Sea DX1200HD Review Part II

Although the review is somewhat dry due to the fact that it is still performed on land :). I will be diving with this setup tomorrow hopefully. So until that time , these are the bits of information that i have gathered while fumbling with the camera and housing buttons and menus:

It is possible to install the battery incorrectly without noticing if you do not switch on the camera after installing the battery. This may be a very nasty surprise if you install the battery incorrectly, close the housing , dive and try to switch on the camera down 40 feet. Since battery performance is less than mediocre you may want to dive with the camera swithched off to save power.

I did mention that the battery performance is rather bad. I have managed to shoot 56 times with the flash on until the battery died and eventual shut down occured. The settings were 12MP Superfine Sea&Sea Mode. In video mode the performance is somewhat better provided that you do not use the zooming function too much.

The batteries are 3.7V 750Ah SANYO battery packs which are available everywhere, it is wise to have them handy. The price was in the range of 10$/pc.
Autofocus is a little bit difficult in low light situations until you get the hang of it, half pressing the shutter release to get a focus lock than composing the picture is a real challenge but can be done.

The close-up lens and wideangle lenses work quite fine which will be good thing during video shoots, you can switch from close-up to wideangle and wideangle to close-up at will.
I have decided to use the Sea & Sea mode and Program (P) mode during my dives. The first is merely to see what this mode is simply capable of and the latter for the greater control it gives in especially setting the ISO speed and White Balance.

Manually setting the White Balance is only possible in the P Mode, but is very very easy, you just switch to +/- change mode by pressing the required button on the lower left, fumble with the up/down buttons to find the WB selection , go to the rightmost choice whose icon resembles a rude and uncanny gesture and press OK. Find a surface on which you want to white balance and press the shutter release, press the OK to save the white balance value. This is it. When shooting with Magic Filters do not forget to change your WB setting every 2 meters.

ISO settings greater that 800 produce visible artifacts and noise which may be handled by software,so upto 800 ISO the setting is possible.
Camera tends to slightly overexpose so a compensation of -1 EV is recommended.


The third and final part of this review will hopefully be a wet one since i will test the camera on weekend during dives in video and photography modes. By that time i have to buy a SD card that works in HD video mode without problems. The 1 GB old cards that i have are only good for 10 minutes :(

Namaste,

NB : The photo attached to the post is taken in Cyprus 3 years ago with a Nikon D50 & 18-55 Kit lens.