Product Specifications
Dimensions - 123mm Outer Diameter x 95mm
Body Construction - Hard Anodized Aluminum Alloy
Weight (air/underwater) - 1.31 kg / 0.6 kg
Lens Construction - 6 elements in 5 groups
Lens Coating - Anti Reflective Coating
Field of View (diagonal) -130_ (with 28mm primary lens)
Mount System – Marelux Bayonet
Depth Rating - 100m
The Niche Market of Underwater Optics
Compared to traditional land-based photography, underwater photography remains a small, highly niche market. Major manufacturers—including Sony, Nikon, Canon, OM System (Olympus), Sigma, and Panasonic—have never designed an interchangeable lens specifically for the underwater environment. The sole exception is Nikon, which produced the dedicated Nikonos underwater lens system decades ago. Because all modern lenses are optimized strictly for land use, they struggle with the unique optical challenges of shooting beneath the surface.
Optical Challenges: Land vs. Water
There are profound physical and optical differences between shooting in air and shooting in water:
Light Loss and Color Absorption: On land, light reflects off a subject, travels through thin air, and enters the camera lens directly with minimal distortion. Air is highly transparent, meaning distance has very little effect on image clarity. Underwater, water acts as a dense medium that rapidly absorbs light. Long-wavelength colors like red and orange disappear within a few meters, leaving only short-wavelength blues and greens. While powerful strobes or video lights can restore natural colors, they are only effective at very close distances.
Port Refraction and Corner Distortion: Before reaching the camera lens, light must first pass through a waterproof flat or dome port, which is typically 12–13mm thick. Even high-quality optical glass causes severe refraction as light transitions from water, through the glass, and into the air inside the housing. This refraction is mild in the center of the dome but worsens dramatically toward the corners and edges.
This edge refraction degrades images in two distinct ways:
Chromatic Aberration: Different wavelengths (colors) of light bend at different angles when passing through the glass, causing color fringing.
Geometric Distortion and Softness: Because refraction increases toward the edges, images lose sharpness, precision, and resolution, leading to heavily distorted or blurred corners.
Standard land lenses cannot compensate for these underwater distortions. To achieve true high-quality imaging, a specialized conversion lens is an absolute necessity.
The Marelux Solution: Aquista 130 wet Conversion Lens
Marelux has designed a comprehensive ecosystem of macro and wide-angle underwater conversion lenses, featuring both wet and dry optical systems. The Aquista 130 is one of our premium wet conversion lens engineered to eliminate underwater optical flaws:
Dome Interface Technology: The outer dome interface minimizes light refraction right at the water boundary, ensuring light enters the optical path as cleanly as possible.
Precision Internal Optics: A proprietary multi-element lens configuration actively corrects chromatic aberration and edge distortion.
Wider Compatibility & Angles: It accommodates a significantly wider viewing angle than the camera lens could manage on its own, producing grand, cinematic perspectives.
Superior Light Transmission: The ultra-wide field of view allows more light to reach the sensor, enabling photographers to shoot wide-angle scenes at much smaller apertures for greater depth of field.
Underwater Detachability: Featuring a fast-release docking system, this setup allows users to install or detach wet lenses quickly and easily while underwater. This versatility enables a seamless transition back to the original lens inside the port, while also providing the option for a much wider field of view and varied creative styles during the same dive.
Without a high-end conversion lens, underwater photos frequently suffer from corner blur, unnatural color shifts, and edge distortion. Shooting through the Aquista 130 significantly resolves these issues, delivering stunning, edge-to-edge sharpness and flawless corner resolution.
A Superior Technical and Economic Choice
Although wet conversion lenses are heavy and premium-priced, they represent the future of underwater photography. A traditional wide-angle setup requires a massive glass dome port, which carries a similar price tag, size, and weight to a dry lens but cannot match its optical performance. Because the dry conversion lens delivers incomparably better image quality, it is both the technically superior and more economically sensible choice for high-end shooters.
The Marelux Aquista 130 is a great choice of precision engineering. It corrects corner color shifts, eliminates distortion, and drastically expands your field of view. When paired with a standard 28mm camera lens, it expands the real underwater viewing angle from a restrictive degrees to a breathtaking 130 degrees of corner-to-corner sharpness.
Going Wide with the Marelux Aquista 130 Wet Lens
