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Hi James , welcome to the forum,
By the "New DSI" I guess you mean the DSI Pro?
I don't have one of those but do have some experence with the DSI-C (colour)
If it's your first foray into digital imaging then the C is cheap enough to buy as a learning camera, it is capable in the right hands of taking excellent images, when I say the right hands I mean somebody who understands image processing, this is the most challenging part of digital imaging, sadly I find it a bigger challenge than most but I have manged to get at least one DSI C shot published which was a bit of a surprise:-))
The DSI-C can certainly collect the data, it is a very sensitive camera.
The DSI Pro is a monochrome camera, so if you want to do colour imaging then you must use filters, The Pro is 4 times more sensitive then the C, so Data collection should be no problem, there will be more processing with the Pro than with the C
as images will need to be processed and stacked.
As to cost the C is around $500.00 I don't know the price of the Pro but have heard it is around $1000, but I could be hundreds off it may well be cheaper.Anybody else know?
So I guess at $500 the C is affordable
If it is the Pro you are interested in then for a similar amount of money I would consider a Canon 350D, body only can be bought for around $900 I think maybe cheaper now its been a while since I last checked the price.A modified 350D is around the $16- 1700
With the Canon you will still have to learn some processing but proberbly not as much as with the DSI.
The DSI's have two things over the 350D, the Meade software is nothing short of brilliant, you can take as many long exposure images as your mount will allow and the software will stack them and give you a single image to process, or using the Fits format will give you the RGB images stacked as one for each colour.
I have taken up to 4 minutes unguided with my EQ6 and I generally get up to 1 minute with my EQ5 unguided with a good drift alignment, so if you have a good tracking mount it is possible to get decent images using the software without guiding.
The other thing you can't do with the Canon is Autoguide, the DSI-C is a great autoguider, I recently did a comparison of three cameras, the Toucam , Meade LPI and the DSI C
I used a 4" F10 refractor as guide scope and the results where interesting.
With the Toucam I could see 1 guide star on the laptop, same with the LPI,
with the DSI I could see 6 stars on the screen and all stars where clear and very usable as guide stars, testing was done on the same object same scope same night.
hope this helps
David.
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