[bird (Anthony Wesley)]

For those people like me who use firewire cameras for planetary imaging, there's a new high-speed video camera on the horizon from point Grey Research, coming in April 2008.

It improves on the two critical aspects for planetary work - bit depth and bandwidth. The new camera is part of the "grasshopper" series and will have a 14 bit analogue to digital converter as well as 1394b (aka 800mbit) data rate.

Don't know about the price as yet, but I expect it will be *expensive*, like their other cameras. The new camera will use the Kodak KAI0340DM ccd, as used in their other camera the Dragonfly Express. I've owned a DX for the last 2 years and had a very good time with it, on the moon it sports framerates up to 240 fps :-)

I've registered my interest and will get one for evaluation as soon as they are available.

regards, Bird