John Bantin has been a full-time professional diving writer and underwater photographer since 1990. He makes around 300 dives each year testing diving equipment.

Why do so many divers dump air from their BCs by raising the corrugated hose and opening the oral-inflation button? It was to such a question on the www.divernet.com forum that I felt compelled to add a reply.
     Nearly every BC has a dump valve designed to let air out but precious little water back the other way. Most have more than one. Why not use them?
     Do we use the hose because diving instructors were originally using simple horse-collar style Fenzy BCs and that was the only way to do it? As with other diving dogma, was that technique cast in the stone of the training manual? No wonder you have to drain a couple of kilos of water from your BC after a week's diving.
     More on this later. It's a couple of years since I was first sent a BC by Suunto. It proved a well-made item, and apart from a bottom dump operated by a toggle threaded through to the front of the jacket, was a very standard BC.
     I have never seen one at a dive site since so had assumed that this foray into new areas of diving equipment by the Finnish computer manufacturer had not been a success. Then, out of the blue, I received the new improved model, the Suunto Equilite 1100W with integrated-weight system.
     The example sent in arrived just as I was leaving for a liveaboard trip, so having substituted it in my bag for another BC that was tried and tested, I took it away and did 21 dives without giving it much of a second thought.
     Like its sibling forerunner, it proved to be a very conventional BC that fitted me like a glove (I had been careful to request one in size M though the distributor felt I would need size L).
     The buoyancy always seemed to be just where I needed it, despite a bit of a tight hug when fully inflated at the surface - and it gave me the choice of four ways to dump air, either when leaving the surface or during an ascent.
     The corrugated hose attached to its direct-feed hose was the primary approach. You simply pull on it and the design lets air out but keeps the water from getting back in. There is also a quick dump operated by a cord and toggle at the opposite shoulder and another at the lower back. If you did get water in your BC you could always drain it by fully inflating the BC at the surface and then pulling open this lower dump.
     If you don't understand how that works, think about what goes on when you clear water from your mask. Funnily enough, the designer has now abandoned the idea of a front-mounted toggle for this dump.
     What was the fourth way? Oh yes, lifting the oral inflation mouthpiece of the corrugated hose and letting water back into the jacket... and do you know what? Nearly every diver on the boat did it that way!
     The Equilite 1100W has a single tank camband that works with a hard backpack which itself is concealed behind a soft cushion. There are two large self-draining pockets together with four large and two smaller stainless-steel D-rings that take care of any extra items you might feel it necessary to take down with you.
     The cummerbund was adjustable for girth at the backpack and closed by velcro with a wide strap and buckle over. I tucked my high-pressure hose and gauge under this. There was also an elasticated sternum strap under which I tucked the corrugated hose and direct-feed.
     With my octopus-rig retained under a bungee around the tank, I stayed neat and without any dangly bits. In this way I did no damage to my surroundings under water.
     I used the BC with a large, floaty aluminium tank and took advantage of the rear trim-weight pockets positioned at the back of the BC and closed with pinch-clips. The front, ditchable integrated-weight pockets easily took more than 4kg each side and were kept in place by three layers of overlapping velcro.
     If you need more than the 16kg of lead afforded by the maximum possible when the trim-weight pockets are added, integrated-weight BCs are probably not for you. But it certainly is a pleasure to dispense with a weightbelt.
     The Suunto Equilite 1100W did not offer me any exciting features, but it did work extremely efficiently. What more could I ask for?
The Equilite 1100W costs £295.

The rear trim-weight pocket is closed with a pinch-clip

You have to start somewhere
"No experience necessary," it said on the box. The Sea & Sea MX-5II underwater camera came to the right place, then. My experience of underwater cameras extends about as far as Roy Keane's patience, writes Steve Weinman. Normally we get someone who knows what he's doing to test equipment, but as this is a starter package it made sense for a starter to try it out.
     The point-and-shoot MX-5II, an extension of the MX-5, seemed ruggedly built but toy-like in its yellow case, looking a bit feeble on the dive-boat alongside the big boys' toys.
     Rated for 40m, it has a wide 28mm f/9 fixed (or "focus-free", as the marketing folk prefer) lens. It proved idiot-proof to load and unload, with its auto-advance/rewind mechanism and confirmation of loading, and batteries were easy to install too.
     The dedicated YS-20A flash is equally quick to mount. It synchronises automatically with the camera, using an infra-red optical triggering system. All you need to remember when using it is to cover the inbuilt flash with the hinged flap.
     The sportsfinder, which allows you to line up on a subject without your mask getting in the way, is also hinged.
     When closed it protects the lens; unlatching it automatically switches the camera on. It swings up and locks in place, though I did find that the lock, along with the inbuilt flash cover and film-speed settings switch, all proved a little too easy to dislodge or move inadvertently under water.
     With the flash, and a bayonet-mounted close-up lens that fits over the lens under water when required, this package weighs in at under £400. It's for people like me who are unwilling to spend thousands on a pro machine which costs a bomb at airline check-ins, traps us into spending hours scanning O-rings for grit, and spells calamity the day the water seeps in.
     The trouble is, that's what you have to go through to get good underwater photos, at least on the evidence of the MX-5II.
     Using 400ASA print film (only 400 and 200 is sold at Heathrow, and the camera settings are for 400 or 100ASA), I knocked out 100 or so shots on Cayman reefs.
     I enjoyed snapping away at anything that moved (very often, as we beginners find, fishes' backsides) and looked forward to seeing the results.
     Then I got the prints back. The last time I had encountered that much blueness was on John Lee Hooker's Greatest Hits.
     The barracuda that had seemed to loom so large in the sportsfinder now looked like minnows in the middle distance. The two large grouper playing nose to nose resembled a car crash on a CCTV recording and the noble tarpon had vanished altogether. The nudibranch I had pinpointed from inches away using the close-up lens had obviously been moving faster than I thought. Yet I could swear I had been right on top of them all!
     Only the outer extremities of a couple of lobsters under a brain coral, and various yellow tube sponges, confirmed that there had been colour and detail on the reef, and that the flash had indeed been working.
     The shots were taken in very clear water at depths between 10 and 30m but, as John Bantin explained, in such conditions flash fights a losing battle with natural light. Naively, I had thought that between the two I would get a result.
     He added that mine were the sort of pictures that amateur photographers often showed him with pride. Like him, I have often had to explain to the takers of such pictures why they are not publishable. They might be an accurate record of an unlit underwater scene, but why inflict them on others?
     Still, the focus was reasonably sharp, particularly on some medium-range wreck shots, and in less bright natural conditions the flash might well succeed in digging out the warmer colours of the spectrum. The Sea & Sea MX-5II does allow underwater photography without the hassles, even if it might also be without the colour or exciting close-ups.
"No experience necessary" is fair enough, and at £399 you could do worse than use an MX-5II to hone your fish-framing skills.

Intelligence test
Mares says the Phos Tronic is intelligent. Fine, but what about me? Diver's Technical Editor was determined not to be scared off by a bulb and battery in a box, but this was the first time I had really had to study an instruction manual for a lamp.
     In fact there was little to worry about. I charged it in the normal way, switched it on by pressing the button on the handle, and pointed it at things I wanted to illuminate.
     Well, actually there was a bit more to it than that.
     The Phos Tronic gives you lots of information via an illuminated LCD screen in its handle. It tells you what power setting you are using via one of three sun icons. Switching on each time at the last power setting used, choosing between the three strengths is effected by pressing the electronic sequential switch-button in the handle.
     It also estimates how long the lamp will stay lit in that setting and displays the duration in minutes on the handle. This gives you the opportunity to manage a whole night dive in such a way that you finish with the light still on.
     The first thing I had to do was charge the ni-mh battery pack. This can be done at any state of charge and the sophisticated charger will automatically adjust to any voltage. I unscrewed the front half and plugged in the lead.
     This was the first fence at which I was to fall. The Phos Tronic knows that it is being asked to take a charge but, answering a question with another question (don't you hate people who do that?) it then demands to know whether you want to charge at a snail's pace or hare ahead.
     I did not realise this at first, and wasted a good hour looking at a lightning icon that indicated progress that was doing little for the battery pack. The Phos Tronic waits for you to press the button to give it your decision, choosing the appropriate snail (14 hours) or hare (5 hours) icon. During the charging process its LCD shows the state of charge as a percentage of the whole.
     One big disadvantage I discovered is that if your lamp is in a crowded charging locker on a boat and someone disconnects it momentarily by mistake, simply reconnecting does not do the job. The Phos Tronic sits and sulks, waiting for a decision that does not come until you discover what happened - which may be just before you want to use it.
     It also has a self-diagnostic mode should things go wrong, and the expression in your face at this time is mirrored by an icon of a frowning face in the display. You can press the button for three seconds or more and get a code number which is translated in the manual to a particular fault.
     For example, fault 16 is when the lamp has switched itself off due to excessive temperature levels within the battery pack. Fault 6 is when the unit switches itself off because the battery pack has reached its lowest acceptable level of charge.
     The unit feels quite heavy but I am told it weighs less than 1kg immersed. The balance was perfect in the hand. At 29cm long, it is no midget and out of the water weighs more than 4kg.
     The sequential switching translated into frantic button-jabbing at times. Under water the 12V, 50W xenon-halogen lamp gave plenty of light with not too wide a beam angle. I found it worked admirably lighting up subjects in natural colour that were already exposed to midsummer Mediterranean sunshine. I like to be selective where I point a torch, especially at night.
     All well so far, I took it into a cave system. I had just lost sight of the blue window of daylight and was comforted to see on the illuminated display in the handle that I still had 28 minutes of burntime left at that power setting.
     Then the lights went out. There was no warning. No frowning face glowered in anticipation of failure. The blackness was relieved only by the red glow from the ready-light of my underwater photo flashgun.
     I surfaced through a lens of fresh water into an air pocket and suggested to my buddy that this was no place to loiter. We returned, our way lit by a far less intelligent lamp - but one that worked! So the Phos Tronic gives a great light in a nice package but proved to be not very clever at all.
     To be fair, most of the electronics are aimed at longevity of the unit rather than clever gadgetry for its own sake. Made in aluminium, it should take a few knocks. Let's hope that the electronics have not made it unnecessarily complicated.
     My Phos Tronic was not flooded, though I never got it to work again - or tell me why it wouldn't work. Perhaps I had an early example with a design defect that will be rectified. The importer thinks that might be why it has yet to receive supplies.
The Phos Tronic with charger is expected to cost around £375.

Slipping slightly along
Despite all the comparison tests we do comparing the sort of fins commonly used by divers equipped with suits and boots, it's a fact of life that the best performance is always obtained with slipper-type versions of the same fins. They slip through the water better, which is why champion free-divers always use them.
     It's a sadder fact of life that even though I spend my life diving, when I take a holiday with my kids I still cannot keep out of the water.
     Of course, our luggage then is occupied with the copious amounts of clothing and accessories that my wife and daughters deem necessary for a holiday in the sun, although they never seem to wear much once they're there! I am allowed to sneak into a bag only a lightweight suit, masks and snorkel together with a lightweight pair of slipper fins. This year I took a pair of Oceanic Caribes.
     Unlike my regular scuba-diving fins, these weigh very little and look less than robust, but I could get a pair in XL size to accommodate my size 47 feet. They come with ribbed edges to their blades and a soft centre section that scoops the water nicely.
     They proved quite effective at propelling me through the shallows and I spent many happy hours enjoying a bit of solitude in the clear shallows of a rocky Majorca cala, observing the activities of the odd small octopus or shoals of browsing saupe, and getting a bit of peace and quiet on the side.
The Oceanic Caribe fins come in three colours and in 7 sizes (3-4 to 48-49) and cost less than £22.