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Thought I’d share my first impressions after a few days fiddling with the Nauticam T7 monitor.
First dive, I really wasn’t sure about it: imbalanced housing, couldn’t reliably review my photos (the R5II kept flicking between resolutions) and a few other hiccups.
I got a few tips from Nauticam and Canon, and then had another dive with it today, and WOW I really enjoyed shooting stills with it (and unsurprisingly, videos too).
Whenever I am writing an equipment review I take notes as I got and I thought I’d share some these in TUC forums, in case that’s of interest to anyone and you don’t want to wait for my long-term article, which is still a few months away:
What I like so far
- Super bright, even when shooting just below the surface at mid day on a sunny day (which I did today).
- It’s really enjoyable to look through. As UW photographers, we experience much of the dive through our EVF or rear LCD, now I get a much more enjoyable view of the dive
- The swivel makes moving the monitor around super easy: I can hide & frame a shy porcupinefish from the side, I can (almost) always frame up including the surface, without having to push myself in weird positions.
- Great for showing photos to others in between/after dive
- Doable to position a snoot, as I can fully rotate the monitor and get it to face upwards
- Battery life seems humongus (235mins of continuous use so far and still green)
- Especially. for OC divers, you can shoot at arm length / stand further behind the camera and hence be less disturbing (bubbles) to subject
- Approach: some fish recognize your eyes / where you’re looking. Easier to look away while framing a photo, with a monitor.
- Contrast handling seems better than that of an EVF or camera LCD (if you’ve taken the lesson on Histograms, you know these can’t be trusted to assess over/under exposures, but I felt the T7 did better on that area).
What I dislike so far
- fair bit negative UW => can be offset with extra floats, but then rig harder to balance and trim.
- No ‘sleep’ mode: wish the monitor could sleep when camera sleeps
- Takes quite a few seconds to ‘wake up’ when camera wakes up => could miss the shot, maybe a firmware upgrade could address this.
If anyone has questions feel free.
