How to ruin a $10,000 camera with just a little salt water..

Just a little salt water got in the UW housing and touched the bottom of the camera:
https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2020/0 ... -teardown/

Very interesting. Water and anything electronic do not mix well. About 2015 I had a canoe "incident" causing my 7D and 24-105 to go for a swim in a freshwater river. The camera and lens ended up submerged long enough that they were totaled. Thank you for insurance that covered it without questions. Another thing interesting in this article is the apparent lack of weather sealing in a camera as high end as this.

Ed Cordes wrote:Very interesting.  Water and anything electronic do not mix well.  About 2015 I had a canoe "incident" causing my 7D and 24-105 to go for a swim in a freshwater river.  The camera and lens ended up submerged long enough that they were totaled.  Thank you for insurance that covered it without questions.  Another thing interesting in this article is the apparent lack of weather sealing in a camera as high end as this.

Medium format for the most part is still considered to be a studio endeavor primarily.  That said I was surprised too because the lenses are well weathersealed and as far as I can tell my GFX-50S is better sealed than the 100 but then water coming in from the bottom has been the bane of many a camera that was considered weathersealed.  They typically test it for moisture from above as in rain but don't test it well for bottom side egress.  The Sony a7 models had the same issue until we got to the R4 and a9 bodies which try to protect from the bottom as well.

The new Hasselblad 907x 50C is a beautiful camera but has absolutely no weathersealing whatsoever making it essentially useless as an outdoor camera.  I doubt it would keep working more than a minute or two even in a sprinkle and would get trashed on a single windy day here in the desert.

"But did you notice all those weather resisting barriers and gaskets in the teardown? Yeah, me neither. " I do love Roger's teardowns. I guess you have to ask yourself if you really need to take a 10k camera underwater?

I did see a review of the Hasselblad E.J mentions too, stunning image quality, amazing DR but no good as a landscape photographers camera in the UK.

Neilyb wrote:" I guess you have to ask yourself if you really need to take a 10k camera underwater?

Plenty of people take expensive gear UW, something around $5,000 is not uncommon.  But proper Housings for something like the Fuji are not something you just happen to have lying around.  The Nauticam housing for this camera is $11,000!  I haven't done an exhaustive search but it appears to be the only proper housing on offer.   

I would guess they used some sort of bag housing or similar and didn't seal it properly.  As long as you service the o-rings properly proper UW housings are absolutely watertight.

Taking a medium format UW is  a big deal though, the domes required for the wide angle lenses will be very large and expensive, the domes actually scale with sensor size.

In my younger days, I used to do a fair bit of Scuba diving. One roll of film in the camera and no idea if things worked out until you got your film developed. It must be a lot more fun these days. I can't remember the name of the rechargeable underwater flash I had, but it weighed a ton and used rechargeable batteries. It had a crappy design where a flat rubber gasket sealed the flash when you clamped it. If you put too much pressure on one side, the gasket could ripple slightly, and you wouldn't be able to detect it until too late. I dove in with one time, checking it as I descended because I was paranoid about seals and saw a tiny puddle appear. I surfaced immediately, cleaned and dried it, but the electronics were dead as a doornail. I tried for a warranty repair because the design was a known issue, and the company did a full replacement at no cost, so lucky me. The replacement came with a new O-ring design, round instead of flat rings.