[Paul Haese]

I took delivery of this camera last night. The camera is purely for my solar imaging but could easily be used for planetary work using the ROI feature.

First impressions are very good. A little bigger than the flea3 but still the same PGR quality.

Connecting it up was just like using the Flea3 and downloading the latest version of Fly capture will allow programs like Fire Capture to operate the camera.

The camera produces large 2.8mp format images, so video quickly results in 2.5gig for 70 seconds of data using 8 bit. I found using the camera without some RAM support quickly resulted in slowing right down to 3 frames a second. Using a RAM drive allowed 26 frames per second for a period of 40 seconds before any slow down occurs.

Low gain settings produce little if any noise. I could detect hardly any noise in the videos I shot. Imaging the sun will certainly make certain of this. Other users have stated that the gain setting on Sol was nearly at the zero line and that resulted in little noise.

This camera requires an 800mbit adapter to operate at peak speed. Newer laptops don't have the adapter excepting in the business machines of various suppliers. You could run this alternatively on a desktop with the PCI board supplied in the developers kit. If you already have a developers kit you don't need to buy another, and you can tell point grey that you already have one and don't need another. If you are buying a PGR camera for the first time you will not be given the option, you will need to buy the kit.

So from what I have seen so far this camera is going to serve my purposes well. Stay tuned for the images.