Hi all,
I'm comparing one-shot-colour cameras to determine what the best camera would be for my purposes (that being, a short tube refractor: Megrez 90 ~590mm focal length, large undistorted field).
My comparison of 7 chips used by various camera manufactures currently has me leaning towards the Sony ICX-841 chip which is used in the ATIK 490EX and Starlight Xpress SX-814C cameras.
My reasons for shortlisting this chip are:
- Reasonable size and resolution at 9.1MP
- Reasonably well matched pixel size at 3.69 resulting in ~1.2 arcsec/pixel
- Reportedly good QE compared to other OSC chips
Of the cameras, the SX-814C appears the best with ~40 delta cooling as compared to ~25 delta cooling and perhaps slightly lower read noise.
Cameras aside and considering the chip only .....
I note that the ICX-814 has relatively small Full Well Depth of 18,000. This is even lower than the generally considered to be low Kodak 8300 chip at 25,500. I'm not entirely clear what practical difference this will make, can anyone elaborate? As I understand it, the pixel may fill up more quickly but if anti-blooming is effective this still wouldn't result in blooming. The result then would be reduced dynamic range. Am I right?
Does anyone have either of these cameras to show examples or comment on their effectiveness?
- Starlight Xpress SX-814C
- ATIK 490EX
Thanks,
Roger.