We bought another underwater camera last week. It is basically our friend Barbara’s fault because she said that our Sealife Reefmaster – while small – is crap (not a quote).

We think the Reefmaster is OK but pictures are usually grainy below 15m. Even above water, the tiny little lens hole does not let a lot of light through, it seems. When we bought it, we thought about getting a more expensive Olympus mju770sw plus an extra underwater housing. We liked the mju770sw when we rented it in at the Great Barrier Reef. But we thought that we are too clumsy for it and will break it. So we should get something more durable.

(Olympus mju770 somwhere at the Great Barrier Reef the whole series)

The Sealife Reefmaster is robust. It was dragged along in the sand and along rocks more than once. And with lots of light even we were able to take pictures that we like.

(Sealife Reefmaster somewhere at Fiji the whole series)

Since we will never be good photographers, we instead buy more expensive equipment. So for the next trip to the Cook Islands we just bought a Seamaster DC 1000 and tested it at Shelley Beach last Saturday.

Conditions were average but the camera is good, we think. We took pictures with both cameras and these were at probably 7m. We did not set a manual white balance but used the default setting for sub 25ft or so. The Reefmaster had better colours but the pictures are a lot better with the DC 1000. I think I like the original Reefmaster colours best because they seem to be closest to what I remember seeing. But the detail on the Seamaster DC1000 is tons better. So next time we will try with the manual white balance slate.

Left Reefmaster, right DC1000, top original colours, bottom Gimp auto white balance adjusted. The images link directly to the original sized versions (~2-3.5MB).