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Originally Posted by SimmoW
Hmm, thanks for posting Lee, I am currently tempted to get this mono version over any 8300 alternative, with the price being so good. What are your thoughts on the cam? Especially if I team it with my 430mm FL tak? Keep posting pics!
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Cheers Simmo. I haven't used the cam enough to have a firm opinion on it, so my advice is based mostly off specs and the experiments done by others.
I wouldn't buy an 8300-based camera--I was never prepared to take the hit of higher read noise, dark current (and thus noise) and low QE. You have to trade all of that away to get a bigger FOV than you get with sony-based cameras and I was never willing to do it. If I had more light polluted skies and if my main targets were very large, maybe I'd have considered it, but neither are true for me.
First off, the ASI 1600 is a bit of a risk. There's not been much work done with it yet, and it may have some annoying issues (detailed below). It's up to you whether those (possible) issues are deal-breakers or not.
I think the ASI 1600 would pair well with your 430 scope and better than the 8300 due to the pixel size. You'd get about 1.8"/px with the ASI 1600, and 2.6"/px with an 8300. The former is undersampled, the latter much more so.
The ASI has significantly lower read noise, dark current and about the same QE (we think) and the price is great, so while the pixels are smaller, you're probably not losing much at the pixel level in terms of SNR, whilst still getting better sampling.
There's a few down sides to the ASI though. It has amp glow, and if you want to do super long subs, it's going to be a problem. It's fine with short subs. At this stage I'm not sure I'd want to be using it for subs over 10mins in length. Having said that, due to the reasonable QE and the low read noise (< 2e @ unity), you shouldn't need to do long subs anyway as, for broadband images at least, you should quickly become sky limited.
The next downside is, based on others' reports, there seems to be differences in calibration frames between sessions. What I mean by that is if you shoot calibration frames one night, then power down the camera, you may not be able to use those calibration frames the next night. I've not been using any calibration subs, and when I do I hope to keep the subs fairly short and avoid doing anything besides flats & bias, which I can reasonably capture each night.
Final downside (imo) is there's been a lot of issues with the drivers and compatibility with SGP. Seems to have been working well with other software. I expect these issues to be transitory, that's the great thing about software eh? Still, if reliability is more your thing, that's a tick against the ASI 1600 at the moment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
A nice dreamy looking Lagoon. Nicely done and worth the effort.
Greg.
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Thanks Greg!