Chris
If it helps you or any prospective purchaser, I would like to offer my experience with this camera.
I also have one of these and my early experiences with my C9.25 at f10 were disappointing on anything but globular or open clusters. However, one night I plugged it into my 80mm f7 WO refractor and it seemed to work fine, producing a reasonable colour image as expected. I just haven't had the time and opportunity to do more, but I have learned the following:
- It absolutely requires a USB2 connection - it will not work with USB1.
- My expectations were way too high, coming from a background of using a fully temperature regulated $3000 ST7E ccd camera which operates beautifully and produces superb images and comes with world class CCDSoft camera control software.
- For $579 with the right 'scope, it may prove to be a good entry into ccd imaging
- The supplied software, MaximDL Essentials, is very, very basic.
- Ccd imaging has a steep learning curve, and as an entry point, I believe that the Starshoot and its software makes this more difficult compared to my ST7E.
- You need to purchase a separate mains adapter to operate the peltier module; it really does make a difference when you cool the ccd.
Just thought I would provide another view. What attracted me was the following:
- Use it as a guiding camera
- chip size of 752 x 582
- colour
- USB2 download speeds
So, I very much felt like you when I first began to use it, but I am going to persevere and see if I can make it work as a guide camera with the occasional foray into colour ccd imaging when required, as my ST7E is B&W only.
Edit:
There is an Orion StarShoot Yahoo group at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Orion_...guid=174222758
where you can see examples of some very nice images taken with this camera.
Cheers
Dennis