Yes, I have definitely come to some conclusions already. I could already write a book on this subject!
In some ways I feel the LPI is better. I love the way you can just set the quality filter & then auto stack. It won't stack the image taken until the frame meets the required % rate you allocate. Last night I set it to 85% & because the seeing was rather poor/coming & going it took 20 mins to get a 68 frame stack. I got a pretty darn nice image of Saturn with an almost perfect CD!
One of the problems with the meade software is I can't seem alter the white balance (red & blue) to get rid of the green ring refractor syndrome like you can in the Philips software for the toucam. More experimentation is needed here. It is indeed clunky software, specially when trying to do imaging any slower than 2 seconds.
Less grain/noise in an LPI final image I reckon too. You can also draw a box around the object & track it.
Just after I shot saturn with the LPI (68 frame stack) I shot it again with the toucam (600 frames, stacked 200) The end result was I deleted the toucam image & kept the LPI image because it was clearly a better image. To put the 2 saturn images side by side: LPI image: Great CD, little noise/grain. Not realistic colour(refractor induced)to be fixed with software. Very faint globe banding (need more images stacked?)
Toucam image: Heaps grainy, very messy CD,(registax's fault??) object heaps bigger on screen, more globe banding details present.
I tried getting 16 second images of M42 with no barlow, results were crap. need really good seeing conditions for this I suspect.
All up I wouldn't sell either at this stage. I'll post this LPI saturn image soon for experimental/comparison reasons.
Seeing is still King no matter what imaging device one is using.
