Having used a Nikonos underwater camera for many years I, like many others, have been frustrated by the compromises that currently have to be made if you want a decent waterproof camera. Hence the usefulness of the Ewa-marine underwater housing for the Ricoh GR.

It’s either small sensored cameras (that often don’t shoot raw) or hideously priced housings for DSLR.

With a trip to the Bahamas coming up I was scratching around for a solution, and found this for my Ricoh GR – an Ewa-marine 2D-1L housing – in the UK it retails for c. £40.

It’s a well made, robust deformable plastic enclosure (aka a bag) with a high quality glass port. The camera slips inside, you tighten up the seal and operate the controls  through the plastic. In practice you can turn the camera on and off and press the shutter release – using the other buttons gets too fiddly.

I took the Ewa-marine underwater housing for the Ricoh GR down about 10 feet with no problems whatsoever, so all in all I’m very pleased with this combination. Given the similar size for all Ricoh cameras in this series I suspect they will all fit into this housing.

Crucially (as you can see from the pictures) there is no vignetting of the lens against the glass port. This needs a small amount of fiddling to achieve but is not too tricky.