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It was inevitable that this would happen. Its probably a side effect of Kodak's demise. I've been posting lately about how the CCD industry seems to have stagnated from an amateur astrophotography viewpoint.
Meanwhile Sony has become the CCD/CMOS giant. The problem now with Sony is it too is making massive losses and faces an uncertain future if they can't stop the losses. I notice Toshiba and Panasonic have made some great improvements to CMOS chips. Panasonic developed a new type of colour filter array that does not result in a light loss compared with a standard dye based filter array which loses 25-30% of light.
I am interested to see how this 694 goes. Your F3.8 won't be an advantage here though Mike it will be your 12 inch aperture that is the advantage (I think I have that right - F ratio myth). You should still be quite well matched to the optics although that setup may require reasonable seeing to get sharp results. My ML8300 is useless on the CDK17 on anything other than really good seeing nights. Its quite blurry.
The PL16803 leaves it for dead in those situations.But thats at 3 metres focal length.
Greg.
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