After more than 10 years of swimming around lineups with this housing we decide to give the DC-5 housing from Aquatech a thorough review.
A very happy photographer with the Aquatech DC-5.
The DC-5 is designed for the Canon EOS 5D range of cameras and we ran in ours a 5D MkII, 5D MkIII, 5D MkIV and the 5DSR across that 10 year span. We also bought an extra set of o-rings when we first bought it, but we have never used them.
Oh, yeah, and we preview the Edge which houses Canon’s new R5 mirrorless DSLR killer.
Press play and scroll down for the numbers and final word …
Aquatech DC-5 Water Housing for Canon 5D Series
To get 10 years out of a water housing is pretty special. Aquatech's DC-5 is a simple yet impressive piece of kit. It's designed for surfers who want (nearly) full control of their camera in the water and that opens up unlimited opportunities. It's easy to see why they are considered to be the world's very best surface water housings. Across 10 years of weekly usage we managed to find some areas for improvement – or rather we learnt some knacks to get around its few shortcomings. We always struggled with the little rubber interfaces that drive the zoom gears and some rotating buttons. They'd fall off, perish and break. That sucks when you are paddling out somewhere that's cooking and suddenly you can't access a switch. We experienced this often moving between movies and stills. The wires for the pistol grip also started to operate intermittently thanks to their location glued to the sidewall of the housing at a pinch point. But those few niggles aside, with proper preparation, the housing was incredibly reliable. We actually built a strobe arm for it at one point and used it diving – even dropping accidentally to 16m on the Great Barrier Reef once – 6m below its maximum depth range. The housing never leaked and while we maintained a rigorous pre-swim ritual we reckon that is pretty awesome when you hear the horror stories from others. Our go to lenses were the Canon EF14mm f/2.8L with the dome port, the EF50mm f/1.4, the EF24-70mm f/2.8L and the EF70-200mm f/2.8L II. The ports and lens combinations worked so well. The LP ports have a compression and a sleeve O-Ring, but we felt the compression O-Ring was doing all the work. The plates that come for each camera model don't have any locator pins and that means occasionally the camera can sit skew-whiff in the housing. A gentle tap corrects this.
Overall we think the Aquatech DC-5 is an outstanding water housing and testament to the commitment to quality design and production values at Aquatech HQ. We bought the Aquatech Edge Pro for the R5 and have started to use that now as a result.
Derek Morrison
What We Liked
Survived 10 years of regular use
Spanned four different Canon 5D upgrades
Agricultural design elements mostly serviceable
Still on original O-Ring
Leak-free
Easy to maintain
Nearly full access to controls
Modular with ports, strobe and pistol grip
Plungers silky smooth after 10 years
What We Didn't Like
Pistol grip wire frays where glued to sidewall
Zoom gears fiddly
Rubber connections on controls fall off/break/perish
No on/off switch access
Outdated port system
User Rating: 5.0/5
( 1 votes )