|
I have one on loan from my friend Apoman and its great to use for visual observation of fain objects that are difficult to see at the EP.
Are you looking to image with it or use it for visual via a monitor?
I would consider the Gstar-X as its cheaper to get locally than the Stellacam III, and its performs just as well if not better. The Stellcam has one advantage which is weight, its very small and compact.
The alternative to both is the Mallincams, as they are arguably the best ones available. They are hand modified to add active cooling and to improve sensitivity. But they are expensive.
Imaging with them however would require you to have some kind of TV/Video capture card in your computer. If you have a miniDV camera which has firewire passthrough ability then this would be a far better method. But it would then requrie a firewire port on your computer. This method is better because you can plug in the anglogue vide feed into the miniDV camera input and let it do the A/D conversion and get a uncompresed video feed via the firewire in digital format. TV/Video capture cards can do they same but ussualy the cheaper ones requrie fast computers and consume a lot of performance to do so. Also the cheaper cards usualy come with codecs that will compress the image and affect quality. The best option in my opinion is a external device to do the A/D conversion wihtout compression, I think they are called bridges. Good ones are made by Canopus.
Another method is to plug the camera into a DVD Recorder and record that way and transfer to PC via DVD. But again you are compressing the video to Mpeg2 format, which again will mean loss of detail.
All of this adds cost to the process. A DSLR or CCD imaging device maybe a better alternative if your goal is imaging.
Regards
Fahim
|