Intova Sports Camera with 180-Feet Waterproof Housing

When you see 14 megapixels in the advertising, plus underwater to 180 feet, that sounds like an excellent camera. My brother-in-law bought one and we and our spouses took a trip for several dives in the Caribbean. My brother-in-law had his Intova IC 14, my husband had a Canon HV20 in an enclosure, and my sister-in-law and I each had a SeaLife DC1200. We all took video, three of us took stills, and then came the moment of combining our photography into a video presentation of our experience.

My husband has done photo work for nearly thirty years, first running a chemical finishing lab and more recently doing digital graphic arts. He is entirely into color correction, contrast balancing, curve adjustments, and the rest. His concerns rose quickly when he tried to optimize the pictures and video from the Intova IC 14, as opposed to that of the other cameras. Our SeaLife pictures, both still and video, were taken with a warm undersea filter in place, and this gave a somewhat overly orange cast. My husband was able to color correct these quite easily to good color differentiation throughout each scene.

The Intova and Canon images, video and still, were taken in sea blue, without filtering. The color corrected Canon video clips retained a noticeable amount of green cast in the foreground and magenta in the distance, which is a tendency when color correcting straight undersea blue, but in differing light levels color shifts could be greatly reduced, and the video images were clear and realistic, pleasant to see. Meanwhile, the Intova footage had a chunky look from the beginning, from which no fine detail could be extracted. After that, due to lack of color depth, it was not possible to noticeably reduce a severe magenta-green transition. The scenes looked like a Martian landscape, basically with the water bright purple and the ocean floor bright green, in a flat, high contrast presentation. It was frankly difficult to watch once one had seen the other results, with the only other alternative being to turn everything back to a deep blue. The highlights were washed out, the shadows were blocked, there was little subtlety of light transition, and low resolution of detail, and also a bothersome light fringe around dark objects. There was not enough depth of information in the Intova video material to correct that harshness at all. While the Canon video showed subtle details, nothing similar could be brought out from the Intova material.

After a long delay, I have at last successfully attached a short video that compares image qualities of the Intova, the Sealife, and the Canon cameras that we used. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so watch the video to compare better.

With still photos, the SeaLife cameras gave quite a good consumer quality result. Color correction from warm filtering yielded good color differentiation after color correction. Comparing apples and oranges a little bit, the stills from the Intova, which were heavily blue cast, could not be color corrected. First, its deep shadows appear black, but they contain much red, while the highlights are blue. Even color adjustment of the image helps to neutralize the blue, but in that process the shadows begin to pop out with a volcanic red. Preliminary reduction of red in the shadows helps somewhat; you can keep the shadows dark instead of having the volcanic effect. However, the color depth for most of the picture is not much. If you take away the blue, the picture fades, because other colors are barely there at all. Color balancing at best gives a pretty much black-and-white remnant.

We have yet to try warm filtering of the Intova still images in a sea blue environment. Maybe that would help, although the color depth seen so far is a concern. Even if that makes things better for stills, there really seems no helping the video image quality. My husband took a closer look at the camera, to see if something had been overlooked. He made sure that the video was set to its highest quality and most natural settings, and then he took some samples inside a nicely sunlit home living room, thinking that this might give pretty good results. What came out looked much like it was from a $5 computer camera. There seems to be no getting past the chunkiness and the fringing. Yes, this camera will take undersea pictures, and if that is all you see, you might be delighted with the good memories. You will be able to make out what the scene was about, kind of like the home movies of yesteryear with their accepted fuzziness and their particular jumps from green to magenta to blue, due to different film batches. If you ever compare the results from the Intova IC 14 to what other cameras can do, though, you will probably wish that you had recorded your precious moments in a different way. Other cameras can make your visual presentation much more like really being there, and that better honors what you pay for your plane ticket.

Since the original writing of this review, my brother-in-law bought a SeaLife D1400, which does a better job, and he is through using the Intova. My sister-in-law asked my husband to remove all non-essential footage from the Intova from the record of our trip, because it was so distracting alongside the other video.

When we moved to Hawaii my husband started research on cameras and underwater housings. We already had 2 other cameras that are great but not able to go underwater. When he found this one, it sounded great. He bought it locally without ever testing it out in the store. The first couple of times he used it, the pictures he took were horrible. Extremely grainy, blurry, and many were very out of focus. We thought it was just the settings he used or maybe because it was the first underwater camera that he had ever used. The next time we went to the beach we took all 3 cameras (this Intova, an Olympus Stylus and a Canon Rebel EOS t3) and I took several pictures with each one on the beach (the Intova without the housing). The Intova actually has 2 megapixels MORE than my Canon t3 but you would NEVER know it. The pictures that the Intova takes are awful. The 14 megapixels actually look like about 5. Both of our Android phones take MUCH better pictures than this camera.

We decided to give it a try underwater again and took it with us snorkeling. While it did a bit better underwater than on the beach without the housing, the pictures are still really grainy, out of focus and blurry. It is extremely hard to see the screen through the housing under water so you cannot see what you have the camera pointed at and cannot see how far you are zoomed in to the subject you are trying to focus on. The buttons on the housing are hard to push.We are definitely on the hunt for a different underwater camera because this one in a word, sucks.

Buy Intova Sports Camera with 180-Feet Waterproof Housing Now

Purchased this camera for a trip to Cozumel. The camera took great pictures. I didn't have any issues with the case leaking. The only issue I had was with one of my SD cards.

Read Best Reviews of Intova Sports Camera with 180-Feet Waterproof Housing Here

This camera is so easy to use and takes beautiful underwater photos and video. Check out my You tube video of a tiger shark on a recent scuba dive to Beqa Lagoon, Fiji.

Want Intova Sports Camera with 180-Feet Waterproof Housing Discount?