Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover (Port Body Not Included)

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

used with the Ikelite Canon 5D Markll underwater housing

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

Great to use with a VERY short lens, 15mm is perfect especially on a Canon 7D. Make sure you blow off the port if you are shooting above water to remove the water droplets.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

New 4 port locks makes a great product even better.
8" port for the third of the next competitors price.
Take care not to scratch the port inside. Scrachtes on the outer part don't matter much 'cause watter has almost the same index of diffraction so the scratches become invisible.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

I love how versitile this dome is! I us this formultiple lenses!!!

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

This is a very large dome & if you're unaccustomed to underwater video/photography, you can easily bump into coral or other & scratch the surface as I did. It does provide the widest possible view using a wide angle lens. No leakage during frequent underwater sessions.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

I use this with the Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens.
The image quality in this port is really good.
The only bad thing is the huge size of a 8" dome, but that can't be helped if you want the IQ :-)

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

Easy to clean, easy to attach, and not that easy to scratch.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

I use this dome with my Nikon 10-24mm and fisheye lens underwater with my Ikelite D300 housing. Thus far, results have been decent-- only the quality of the materials is questionable. Even when attempting to clean the lens with the softest microfiber cloth, I noticed swirl marks appearing on the dome itself. I was not thrilled about this or with the difficulty of cleaning the inside of the dome. All that being said, this product is relatively inexpensive compared to other brands and the dome itself has yielded excellent results thus far. This is also the most critical piece in the modular port system-- it's hard to avoid buying this dome if you're going wide underwater. I'd just like it a lot more if the dome surface was coated with something more resilient.

No issues whatsoever with leakage, although as you descend, you might hear a few noises as pressure on the housing mounts. These noises made my heart skip a beat the first few times because it almost sounded like something was cracking, but it turned out to be nothing.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

I used this recently on a trip to Baja with a Canon 10-22 lens. Given the fact that this is relatively low-production, high-end stuff, no complaints. The optical quality is great compared with previous compact digicam housing I've used. This is the only dSLR dome I've used, so I can't make a comparison there. But there is certainly no obvious vignetting or aberration, all the way to the edges. It's awesome.

As a potential purchaser, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. The dome is *plastic*. You gotta be careful to not scratch it.

2. It's uncoated. If you shoot over-unders with the sun in the frame, you can get a reflection of the lens itself in your images, if you're not careful.

3. It's very large. The dome and port body are together about as big as the dSLR housing they're attached to.

4. As with wide-angle photography, the large depth-of-field means that bubbles, dirt, etc. on the dome are going to show up very easily.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

I purchased this the 8" dome to replace my 6" dome becuse it showed bad distortion on the sides of all images at very wide angles (10-15mm on 40D). The 8" dome shows much better results.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

I like the fact that the parts attach each other quite nicely and provides a good sealing and conforting you that it will prevent the water inside the system.

Its a very good port for wide angle lenses works good when you are out of the water as well

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

Little chance to use it much yet but a great new tool in my underwater kit! I really look forward to seeing what I can do with this baby!

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

It's very easy to use it with the housing, very dificult to make a mistake, the best way to forget the water inside your housing

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

Used the new 8" dome for the first time last week taking wide angle shots of sharks at South Africa's Protea Banks. When used with my 10-17mm FE lens I got significantly less vignetting than with the old 6" Ike dome. Easy to use and the increased volume of air inside the port gave me an almost completetly neutrally bouyant set up whem combinde with twin stobed. However, although I've had no problems Ikelite's dual port clips do leave one with a slight sense of fragiltiy. On a recent dive a friend of mine did have his dome come loose resulting in a carastrohpic flood. Of course this may have been user error!! personally I'm extremely happy with the port and find mysel moving more from my first love of macro photography to more and more wide angle work.

Comments about Ikelite 8" Dome Port with Shade and Cover:

This is a must have for shooting wideangle. Ikelite products are excellent [...].