Sony DSC-V3 firmware for underwater photos

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Submitted By: SonyDiver

Joined: Sep 6 2005

Posts:

Sony DSC-V3 firmware for underwater photos

Posted: September 6, 2005 - 6:21am

Hello,
I have used my DSC-V3 camera with an underwater Ikelite housing for the 1st time last week and got some feedback: When doing underwater photos, nobody ever use automatic mode. All the photos are done in Manual mode to get the best combination of speed, aperture, ditance, flash power setting. Automatic mode are very good on surface but is not able to compute in a blue or darker environment. Brain needs to take care.
To be helpful (and certainly the others scuba divers using this camera), it would be better to get a diving mode with these specifications: 1) to show the focus distance computed by the camera. It helps choose the flash power and aperture 2) in the Ikelite housing it is nearly impossible to use the knob on top of the jog dial to set speed and aperture values. The underwater pressure is always pushing the jog dial, so it always "randomized" the values set. I had the greatest difficulties to do so (few minutes). That's the disadvantage to have 1 dial to set 2 values. What could help is to sacrifice another button like Night... to replace the pushing on the jog dial and still using the job dial to set values & not taking into account any push on it.

I am willing to take the risk to change the firmware by myself (if I am able at least to reload the original firmaware).

Do you know how I could get my hands on the firmware and development environment?

Thanks

Submitted By: Anonymous

Re: Sony DSC-V3 firmware for underwater photos

Posted: October 8, 2005 - 4:47pm

I have a similar need for Sony DSC-V3 firmware fixes.

The default program mode is severly weighted towards small aperatures (F8!) I have to manually shift the program to something more sane to avoid diffraction softness and motion blur in nearly every normal situation.

All multi exposure modes disable the flash, regardless of whether an external flash may be able to shoot multiple frames per second.

The timing (pre-fire?) of the internal flash prevents the use of "slave" external flashes.

It is impossible to choose front or rear-curtain flash sync.

The camera arbitrarily decides to use noise reduction at slow shutter speeds and limits the lower shutter speed to 30seconds. This makes it nearly useless for astrophotography.

The camera limits the upper shutter speed to 1/1000 of a second even in manual mode, unless the F number exceeds an arbitrary threshold.

It is impossible to turn off the nightshot illuminator or use the night shot mode in manual. Again this limits its use for astrophotography. Night shot removes the internal IR filter which would make it quite sensitive for astrophotography if these limitations were removed.

Come on SONY, if you can't update your firmware, open the source code so others can. Otherwise my next camera will be a Canon!