| Mark Evans takes a look at the new Sealife DC2000 flagship camera system SEALIFE DC2000 | SRP: $699
www.sealife-cameras.com Mark Evans: There was a time when, rightly or wrongly, SeaLife Cameras were regarded as being one-stepup from a basic point-and-shoot, and didn’t really factor on the radar of anyone who was seriously looking at getting into their underwater photography. However, times change, and over the past few years, the offerings from this progressive company have started to incorporate some impressive features and statistics. The DC2000 is their current rangetopper, and while it comes in at a relatively budget price, you get quite a bit of bang for your buck. For starters, the actual camera itself, which has a large Sony 1-inch back-illuminated 20MP CMOS image sensor and 3-inch 920K LCD monitor, is waterproof down to 60ft, which means if you are snorkelling or pootling around in the shallows, you don’t even need to put it into the housing. It also means it is the perfect ‘boat camera’ - no concerns about it getting splashed, wet, etc, as you capture the action topside. The SeaLife has no less than eight shooting modes - manual, aperture, underwater, shutter, programme, intelligent auto, land, and panorama - and on top of that, with both Jpeg and RAW imaging formats available, it gives the user near-endless photo-editing options. There are four underwater shooting modes, and three built-in digital colour-correction filters shallow water/snorkelling, deep water (normal diving) and even green water, which SeaLife says is for ‘algae bloom’ but actually works well in more-temperate waters to compensate for the standard green! There are a staggering 25 land scene modes to adjust the camera settings for specific shooting environments - portrait, landscape, sunset, dawn, backlight, kids, night scene, fireworks, beach, snow, sports, party, candlelight, night portrait, soft skin, food, background defocus, self-portrait, smile shutter, HDR, time lapse, GIF capture, art effect, continuous shooting, and even love portrait - while the intelligent auto mode selects the optimal land scene mode. If you like take control, with the manual, shutter and aperture settings, you can adjust to your heart’s content - shutter speed can be from 15 to 1/2000 seconds, and F-stop ranges from F1.8 to F11. Manual white balance means you can tweak and customise the underwater colour correction ‘on the fly’ to suit
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