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I went through this process myself a few months ago. Understanding what the spec give you helps narrow down your decision. Bit depth, pixel size, frame rate and exposure range is what I looked at. I was after a do -everthing-cam. Deciding on colour and cooled for where I want to be for the foreseeable future the zwo cams all divide up nicely with the above criteria for specific imaging needs.
Colour over mono because I couldnt afford filters and wheels (annoyingly i have already but cant use due to my stroke, so i its a frustration for me already). Anyway, my 120mc is still going well but not ideal for planetary which is what I doing atm and I wanted to take advantage of mars opposition too and upgrade. So pixel size, fps and fast exposure times were important for planetary. Low noise is on all ZWO cams and my 120mc so old anything would have been an improvement. But I was also interested on doing some captures at full frame instead of cropped (eg for lunar or dso) so something that was bigger than 1mp would have been nice with long exposure capabilities. Cooling was a much anyway. So for me I went with the 178MC-C, nice and fast frame rates for planetary, 6mp for full frame captures. Low noise and pixel size made a massive detail jump immediately over my 120mc. I think for the price its hard to beat for a planetary with all-rounder capabilities in a OSC platform. Recording to an SSD not HDD with a ROI around a planet it doesnt sweat recording around 150fps without dropping frames . The cooler gets the chip to around -30c easily enough, but then its canberra winter so no biggie there, summer will be interesting. Only slight gotcha I had initially is the planetary presets in firecapture typically dont turn on the cooler (which runs so quiet you cant tell when its on) took me a little time to find the panel (with sliders for white balance, brightness, contrast, etc camera controls) which also contained a slider for the target temperature. It doesn't always reach the target temp, eg mine i set to lowest of -40C but i havent seen it reach it, the cooler runs at 100% and maxes out under -30C and is very very steady at temperature. So keep in mind if temp is critical to you.
No problems with software or drivers that werent already there. I cant capture with firecapture 2.6 so use 2.5 instead (same with 120mc), so i just swapped cameras and didnt need to do anything to get it working, the firecap worked a treat straight off, just a little time tweaking settings for the new setup. No bad noise issues noticed yet. But I havent done much long exposure with it. I really love the flat usb3 cable it comes with too.
I highly recommend you take the specs I mentioned earlier and list out the zwo cameras by those and see which cameras best cater to your imaging needs. The 178 is hard to beat on speed and pixel size for planetary and there are slightly faster but at lower bit depth, so understand the specs and the tradeoffs you're making, it looks like ZWO have got the bases covered. I dont think they have "this camera does everything way better than all others" camera, maybe out of my price range, remember these are still budget consumer level equipment. They are not garbage though and for the price point are pretty much the best you can get.
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