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DSLR
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Nexus D200 with TTL Flash and Swivel Viewfinder
The Nexus D200 represents a uniquely specified housing for the pacesetting Nikon D200 digital SLR. It's impeccable pedigree, superb handling, extensive choice of accessories and surprisingly modest price should propel the Nexus D200 to great success. Anthis, manufacturers of the Nexus line, have really achieved something very special with this flagship housing.
Existing Nexus users will immediately recognize hallmark features of this professional housing. Nexus are the housings of choice of both Scuba Zoo, the film team who shoot "Great Ocean Adventures" and the scientific divers at British Antarctic Survey, as well as Pheobe R- D who works at the worlds famous Pinewood Studios Underwater Unit. Nexus are also in service with National Geographic Magazine photographers. It has the familiar clean lines of the Master series and is manufactured to the exacting standards set by Toshi kozawa, the company owner and designer.
The hull is cast from aluminium. This provides several important benefits. Firstly, using alloy ensures the Nexus D200 is very rugged. This, combined with anodizing to protect the casing from corrosion, means that your Nexus D200 will stand up to many years of hard use. Secondly, the Nexus D200 is very light - about 2.5kg with the new Inon Swivel Viewfinder. So your D200 is light enough to pack in a flight bag to travel with you in the aircraft cabin. And it won't break your neck if you are making shore dives and having to schlep it to and from the water. Thirdly, the Nexus Master series of housings have always been renowned for their compact size. The D200 is sculpted around the camera body. This makes your housing easy to travel with and also keeps drag underwater to an absolute minimum.
Toshi has gone to great lengths to make all of the D200's primary shooting controls as easy to use and responsive as possible. It is essential that you don't fumble when the action is fast and furious or you will simply miss once in a lifetime shots. The shutter release is the classic Nexus soft touch design. The lever action pulls back, helping to eliminate any tendency for the housing to "lean" as you squeeze the trigger, which can mar your composition. Toshi is a celebrated underwater photographer who is well known for his extreme macro images. When using high magnification macro lenses, the slightest camera shake is amplified and can ruin the shot. The ultra soft release action all but stops this. Look closely at the Nexus macro ports and you'll see that Toshi also incoporates special cradles to support macro lenses to further reduce vibration. It's also a benefit for low light photography, such as when working in and around shipwrecks, making it easier to hand hold at slow shutter speeds and still get crisp results. Below the release and easily operated by your other fingers is the main command dial. Your thumb naturally falls on the sub command dial located on the housing back. When shooting, these two controls adjust aperture or shutter speed for the perfect exposure. You can decide for yourself which control drives speed and which selects aperture by using your Nikon D200 custom functions. This can personalize the handling of your system to your own preference for ease and speed of use. Your zoom control is set on the opposite side of your Nexus D200 housing and is swiftly operated with your left hand.
Naturally, the Nexus D200 boasts a huge array of carefully placed controls to give you full creative reign underwater. You can playback your images underwater, selecting thumbnails or image zoom, delete, choose quality, ISO and auto bracketing settings, choose from your menus, select your autofocus points as well as lock this mode selector. Toshi uses levers to hold down the exposure compensation and metering pattern buttons for you, so you can change these using your main and sub command dials without having to have three hands. White balance is also available to you - vital for getting those stunning natural light shots with Alex Mustard's Magic Filters. You can also turn off your D200 to save your battery and turn on the light display to make reading your LCD panel easy in low light.
All controls are protected by double O ring seals.
The hull is closed using two over centre latches for security. The base features an anti skid protective pad and fittings for baseplates and a tripod (useful for low light photography and split levels).
The handgrips are indented to stop your hands sliding off, so you can hold them loosely, which makes your housing more comfortable to use for extended periods. The grips are an integral part of the Nexus design and placed to put your fingers and thumbs for swift and instinctive operation of key shooting controls. Because people's hands and fingers differ, Nexus offer spacers that let you move the grips outwards. This can improve handling if you have larger hands or wear thick gloves. The left grip can also be moved forward. This helps counter balance front heavy lenses - for example very long tele macro lenses or lenses equipped with tele converters. If you have a manual focus macro lens moving the left grip forward also makes it much easier to operate the focus control.
The Nexus D200 housing is superbly outfitted for strobe photography. For TTL flash photography all you need is an Inon Z240 and a fibre optic cable. The Nikon D200's own pop up flash is used to fire the Inon Z240 and control the Inon's output. Nikon has developed superb flash technology and relying on the cameras own metering to control your Inon will usually produce perfectly lit subjects. For difficult subjects or creative lighting you can dial in exposure compensation on your inon to deliberately introduce some under or over exposure. You also have 12 manual power settings at your disposal. The fibre optic cables have proven exceptionally reliable in the field and do not require any penetrations through the housing, so are virtually maintenance free. The cable can be installed and removed underwater, so if you have a dual strobe set up and want to take one off the housing for special effects, such as having another diver hold it to better light a subject, you can do. This system completely does away with the need for costly special internal conversion circuitry or expensive and bulky external conversion boxes. Two connectors are provided for dual flash photography. If you prefer to use a housed Nikon strobe, then we can install a hot shoe that will connect to an SB80 or SB800 in a casing made by Subal. This lets you shoot TTL and still operate all your guns controls - so you can compensate the TTL or select manual powers as you wish. For manual flash systems we use a different hot shoe (included with your Nexus D200). Two Nikonos type connectors are provided for dual strobe use. The contacts are gold plated for reliable firing. The socket itself includes a drain port that automatically releases water caught in the sync cable threads and helps avoid droplets falling onto the contact pins.
The Nexus D200 uses the standard Master series lens port. So if you already own a Nexus from Ocean Optics, your existing ports and port accessories will fit. Nexus offer their owners an unsurpassed choice of ports to allow you to use virtually any Nikon lens with an imaginable application for underwater photography. The Nexus port system includes domes for fisheye, wide angle and wide angle zoom lenses and flat ports for mid range zooms, macro's. tele macro's and macro zoom lenses. To further increase your scope to push limits, Toshi provides specialist superdomes for split level photography, a macro port system that's almost a housing in its own right that allows you to use Nikon macro lenses in auto or manual focus, with the option to use rear mounted tele converters, internally mounted close up lenses and the famous Nexus wet close up lens that can be taken on and off underwater. A huge choice of extension rings complements the port selection. Nexus even design their macro ports to accept special mounting rings that allow you to attach strobes and focusing lights directly onto the port for close up work. Two accessory shoes are ready fitted to the Nexis D200 for mounting strobes or focusing lights.
The Nexus D200 Master housing from Anthis is backed up by Ocean Optics. Routine servicing is provided by our founder, Peter Rowlands of PR Productions. Peter has serviced underwater camera equipment for more than three decades and your valuable Nexus D200 will be in very safe hands.
If you would like to drop by to view the Nexus D200 system, please contact Steve or Mark to make an appointment. Expect to spend around an hour and a half on your first visit. Neither Mark nor Steve will encourage you to buy when looking at an SLR housing for the first time. If you later decide to buy from Ocean Optics, you'll be encouraged to return with your camera for half a day to go through your new housing one on one. Steve or Mark will make sure you are completely happy with how to load and unload your camera into your Nexus D200 housing, will check all of the controls, gear up your lenses, show you how to test your strobe circuits and very precisely talk you through the pre dive preparation you must follow to keep the water out of your expensive Nikon D200.
The Nexus D200 is a remarkable housing at a very fair price that is used day in, day out by leading professionals. This superb housing should definitely be on your shortlist.
