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.

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. The DC500's docking station, which is used to conveniently chage the batter and transfer photos from camera to 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. I really like the docking station, as it can be left plugged into AC power and into the computer. 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. The Sealife DC500 Camera, as compared to the popular Canon S400 Digital Elph. The Sealife camera is very similar to the popular Canon SD model and probably uses the same sensor. As shown in the photos below, it is small and thin as compared to the Canon S400 and it has a big LCD display. It has nicely designed controls which will be very familiar to compact camera users. The camera uses SD memory cards and a small rechargable battery. 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 DC500 is an ultra-compact 5 megapixel camera designed for point and shoot photography. The camera also comes pre-installed with a number of underwater modes, for both flash and non-flash photography, which can eliminate much of the settings 'guesswork' for a beginner. This setup is designed for extreme ease of setup and use - with everything included - so that a novice can put together the equipment and put it to good use right away. The elite kit also comes with a nice soft case with die-cut foam inside.

It also came with a SL970 wide angle lens, and lens dock for mounting the lens on the camera tray. The kit arrived with the camera and housing, tray and strobe arm and the SL960D strobe and fiber optic sync cable. I was sent a Sealife Reefmaster DC500 Elite setup for testing.

By James Wiseman Saturday, January 14th, 2006

Sealife reefmaster underwater camera