Fantasea Housings Revisited

Jussi Hokkanen · Issue 94, Jan/Feb 2017 · pp. 34–36

Products mentioned: Fantasea FG9X, Fantasea FG7XII, Fantasea FRX100 IV/V, Canon G9X, Canon G7X MK II, Sony RX100 MK III, Sony RX100 MK IV, Sony RX100 MK V, AOI, RGBlue, i-Divesite UWL-04, Inon UWL-H100, Inon UWL-S100 ZM80, Nauticam WWL-1, i-Divesite UWL-09, Fantasea Dyron 55mm lens, Canon WP-DC55

Some years ago I reviewed a Fantasea housing that was made to fit a hopelessly out of date Nikon bridge camera. There was really nothing wrong with the housing itself but at that time it was just the wrong choice of an overpriced camera. This was compounded by the fact that the Fantasea housing was also at least twice the price of anything similar on the market. Four to five years ago we lived in the “golden age” of affordable high-quality underwater compact cameras. There was so much to choose from that small companies, like Fantasea, were left fighting for the scraps that the big boys leftover. Today however things have changed. Almost all camera manufacturers have stopped producing their basic digital compact cameras. Some companies, like Fuji, have decided not to produce any more compact cameras at all. The remaining manufacturers have also decided to massively reduce the range of un…