Sealife Reefmaster DC500 Review

The DC500 is an ultra-compact 5 megapixel camera designed for point
and shoot photography. It has no specific manual controls for setting
aperture and shutterspeed, instead using a number of preconfigured
modes to set the aperture, shutterspeed, white balance, etc. The camera
uses SD memory cards and a small rechargable battery. It has nicely
designed controls which will be very familiar to compact camera users.
As shown in the photos below, it is small and thin as compared to the
Canon S400 and it has a big LCD display. The Sealife camera is very
similar to the popular Canon SD model and probably uses the same sensor.

The Sealife DC500 Camera, as compared to the popular Canon S400 Digital Elph.

The DC500 also comes with a convient and easy to use docking station
which can be used to connect the camera via USB cable to a computer,
and to keep the camera's battery charged. I really like the docking
station, as it can be left plugged into AC power and into the computer.
The camera can be removed from the housing and inserted into the dock,
and it can be charged and transfer photos without opening up the camera
to remove the card or battery.

The DC500's docking station, which is used to conveniently chage the batter and transfer photos from camera to computer

Housing System

The system consists of the housing, which can be used as a
"stand-alone" or in combination with the camera tray, lens dock, strobe
arm, and the strobe. When used for available light photography, the
tiny DC500 setup is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand or
tuck away into your BC pocket. When the whole setup is used, it can be
folded up and is still small enough to clip to your BC when you need
two hands for other tasks. The housing is hinged on the left and uses
one closure on the right. One of the things I especially liked about
the housing is the fact that all of the buttons are labelled. The
housing is also rubberized, making it easy to grip and it just feels
great in your hand. Inside the housing, there is a specially designed
holder for the provided tube of silica dessicant beads, which keeps
camera lens and the inside of the lens port from fogging up. The whole
system is rated for use down to 200 feet.

The back of the housing setup, showing the labelled buttons and lens dock.

The front of the housing setup, showing the rubberized grip.

The housing is hinged on the left and a silica bead tube is fitted to the housing rear panel

The wide angle lens is compact, and can be fixed to the front of the housing using a bayonet for quick twist and lock mounting.

Strobe

The strobe used 4 AA rechargable batteries. These are inserted into
a casette which snaps quickly into the strobe head which means that if
a number of casettes are purchased, they can be filled with charged
batteries for quick and easy change-outs on the diveboat. The strobe
has a built-in slave sensor with an adjustment switch used to control
the sensitivity of the slave function. The sensitivity can be adjusted
so that the strobe isn't fired by the sun, or by other divers. A fiber
optic sync cable is used to send light from the camera's internal flash
up to the slave sensor on the strobe head. The cable comes with a mount
that snaps onto the camera housing providing a good connection and also
masking the cameras internal flash so that it does not create
backscatter in the photographs. A rheostat switch on the back of the
strobe head can be turned to adjust the strobe's power setting.

The inside of the strobe head, showing the slave sensitivity switch and the battery pack.

The fiber optic cable mount, which snaps over the lens port.

The strobe coverage is adequate for lighting up a large scene.

Image Quality

Because I wasn't able to take the Reefmaster diving, Bjorn Harms
from Sealife was kind enough to send me a photo taken using the DC500
setup underwater using the strobe and wideangle lens. As can be
expected from a consumer camera, there is some noise present in the
photo, but images taken at the base ISO and with good lighting and
exposure should look nice printed up to 8x10 size.