Here’s the straight scoop: About twice a month we get a call asking us to carry underwater housings. This is a much bigger deal than people realize— each SLR camera requires a specific housing, and each housing requires several lens covers, all of which become immediately useless in two years when that model is replaced. When we do the numbers, we’d end up charging about a third of the purchase price for a rental.

More importantly, underwater housings have a very real failure rate, and when they fail, the camera inside is toast: all gone, bye-bye, no repair possible. Logic tells us that if you can afford to ruin your camera, you can afford to buy an underwater housing. So for those of us who can’t afford to replace our nice SLR and lens when the inevitable housing leak occurs, we’ve decided that this is the next best thing. It gives images equivalent to a high-end point and shoot (Canon G10, etc.) in a reasonably priced package that we can actually insure.