Many things have changed since Helen housed her Canon Ixus65 in a polycarbonate housing.
Compact cameras are practically extinct and those left have either a port system as the lens is too long or a shorter 24-70mm equivalent lens which is not useful.
Nauticam developed the N85 port system for Sony APSC (also small form factor) and Micro Four Thirds and since mid 2010s those are the prevaling systems for interchangeable lens system underwater.
APSC in the mirrorless Sony format and today Fuji has lacked native fisheye lenses and been plagued by slow flash sync speed and challenges of battery life.
When it comes to DSLR there is no significant size difference between APSC and full frame when you look at the body but moving into lenses there is a substantial difference with the Tokina 10-17mm being the lens of choice for a compact set up for both Nikon and Canon shooters.
Moving to full frame DSLR has meant historically larger ports bigger lenses and a lot more weight especially if you consider larger domes or the newer water contact optics all in excess of 2Kg and frequently more.
When you look at mirrorless the newer Nikon and Canon systems all use the N120 port system so there is no size difference between DSLR and Mirrorless.
In addition if you are already using N120 dome ports like I am you will soon find out that depending on your housing the weight benefit is not entirely there even for Sony camera whose housing are lighter and use the N100 port system. However housing are in general lighter up to 800 grams less.
Today if you want to have a portable ILC camera for photography you are really only looking at the Olympus/ OM Systems range.
If you have made the choice to get larger N120 ports or you have a Panasonic GH series your housing is already pretty big and moving to full frame will impact only when it comes to certain ports.
Let’s dive into this topic.
Here a first perspective of the A1 housing vs the GH5 housing.
Rear side view
And finally top view
You can see that the A1 housing is a bit thicker a bit wider but not a great deal and the GH5 is taller.
| Dimensions | 340mm  × 169mm (H) × 125mm (D) |
| Dimensions | 331mm × 184mm (H) × 110mm (D) |
Looking at the weight on the scale
Difference is 320 grams the weigtht are higher than reported as there is a vacuum valve installed.
This means that as the GH5 system was already heavy due to the clam shell housing the difference in weight will come from the lenses and ports.
As I use the N120 system for wide angle already the difference in that use case would come from larger adapter weight or larger ports.
For flat ports on the N85 system there will be instead a weight disadvantage due to the different diameter but this is less than the delta between N85 and N120.
In my future posts I will show my port system for the Sony A1 that has the objective of:
- Reducing bulk without totally compromising image quality
- Use as much as possible ports I already had
- Reduce the overall number of parts and adapters
- Offer complete focal range coverage for wide angle
As you will see my macro choices will not go into a direction of reducing weight or bulk but there is a reason for that. You could argue that by using the GH5 and the N120 system I had already killed portability and that is true however unless you want to shoot native lenses on Olympus system there are no real better options to keep image quality and still be relatively light.
Stay tuned for the next articles that will introduce my choices for:
Index of articles with my choice of lenses and ports (continuosly updated):
Interceptor121 Photography & Video Workshops 