Batteries in
the charger.
divErNEt.com
DIVER TESTS
TESTER 8 Mike Ward
PRICE£77
SIZE 8 8 x 8 x 4cm
WEIGHT 8 125g with battery & housing
DEPTH RATING 8 30m
CONTACT 8 akaso.net
DIVER GUIDE★★★★★★★★✩✩SPECS
start/stop and shutter, and the side buttons
allow you to scroll through the menus, using the
top button to select chosen options.
The camera buttons are set proud enough to
press easily but not so much that you’ll catch
them by accident. The housing buttons are
chrome-finished and seem to be backed by
nice, firm springs, so they depress only when
you make an effort to use them.
Much easier to use than the buttons,
however, is the touchscreen on the back of the
camera. It’s generously sized and actually
couldn’t be a lot bigger, as it takes up pretty
much the entire back of the unit.
The icons Akaso uses are clear, the
touchscreen is responsive and setting up the
camera takes seconds.
The EK7000 boasts a top video resolution of
4k at 25 fps, plus a variety of lower-quality
options including 1080 HD at 60 or 30 fps and
time-lapse settings. In Photo mode you get
a choice of resolutions, the highest
being 16m pixels.
Go into the menus and
you can adjust a range of
photographic properties
including exposure
levels and white balance,
although there’s no fully
manual white balance
option.
Instead, you get a
dedicated Underwater
mode that Akaso says
is optimised for
bluewater diving.
It even has wi-fi, so you can
stream the images to your phone on
the dive-deck to impress your mates
or upload to social media.
It comes with a non-
waterproof remote control
for appropriate situations.
In Use
Tour of inspection over, I charged the batteries,
inserted a memory card, selected video at
1080/30 fps, set a third of a stop of under-
exposure, turned the Underwater mode on and
went diving.
Those are my go-to settings for any new
camera, ready to be refined after I’ve tried it out.
In the water, first impressions were good.
The rear screen was big enough to be properly
usable when trying to set up shots, the power
73 divErand shutter buttons were easily found and
pressed even with a thickly gloved hand, and
the images the screen was showing as captured
looked bright, sharp and colourful.
Later viewing on a computer screen
confirmed that the sharpness and exposure
were fine, but the colour wasn’t as good as it
had looked.
Never mind, a bit of post-processing restored
it very nicely without a quality drop, and using
the 4k mode and downsizing to 1080 in the edit
will improve this further.
That’s all in the top 5-6m of water, of course.
Deeper than that and you’ll still need filters or
an external light source.
In absolute terms, the EK7000 doesn’t come
close to rivalling the out-of-the-camera colour
delivery of a Paralenz, but then it’s about an
eighth of the price.
Screenshots taken from 1080 video show the
sort of results that it’s possible to achieve.
Exposure control was fair to good. In normal
use the exposure was consistent and adjusted
very quickly when conditions changed.
I test this by pointing the camera directly
downward then rolling it through 360° smartish
but not silly-fast, so the camera tracks from
bottom to surface to bottom in a couple of
seconds.
Many action cameras lag horribly. The worst
I ever tried hadn’t figured out that it was no
longer pointing to the bottom until it was back
there, but the Akaso performed well.
The bottom was nicely
exposed, the surface
was nicely exposed
and there was
only a hint of lag
as the camera
smoothly
adjusted to the
brightness
change.
Low-light
performance was
OK without being
excellent, the
footage becoming
noticeably grainy.
That’s pretty
much par for the
course with small-
sensor cameras like
this, and no worse
than many other
action cameras.On the Downside
Which brings us to the downsides. Not that
they’re anything too significant, more aspects of
which you should be aware.
First, the camera didn’t much like shots where
some of the frame was brightly lit and some
was darker. Really wide dynamic ranges were
not handled well, though footage of surface
swimmers was actually pretty decent, holding
detail in both the bright surface and the darker
undersides of the swimmers’ black wetsuits.
Second, you can set the field of view fromsuper-wide to narrow, but narrowing the field of
view is achieved by applying digital zoom to the
sensor. Essentially, an increasingly small section
of the image is magnified as you choose a
narrower field of view, which reduces image
sharpness and overall quality.
Better set the angle of view to super-wide
and zoom in post if you really must. Oh, and
turning the image stabiliser on also has the
effect of narrowing field of view, reducing the
utility of the function.
Third, you have to remember to turn the
Underwater mode off above water, otherwise
you get red footage.Conclusion
Bear those few little pointers in mind and you’ll
get very decent results from this little camera.
I hadn’t heard of Akaso before the 7000 landed
on my doormat, but on the strength of this £77
offering I’m impressed. In absolute terms it’s an
Akaso EK7000 30m housing. 8 out of 10, but I’d happily buy one. ■Top to bottom: Direct from the camera – sharp, but the
colour isn't great; colour can be brought out in post-
processing; pike portrait, with colour correction in
post-processing.