From: "Steve Bryson" <stevebeam@yahoo.com>

Date: November 21, 2005 11:13:51 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Having fun with my Fire-i, but what about better cameras?

Thanks for all the replies!  Here are some more questions below for clarification.  

I'm close to choosing the Flea and want to make sure I'd use the extra

value.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@o...> wrote:

--- snip question and answer ---

You can also run the cameras in 8 bit modes too.

Will it stay 12 bits if I use, say, Keith's Image Stacker (I know KIS

is 16 bit

capable, but I'm confused about how the images get in with all 12  

bits).

Nope. KIS does not handle 16 bit movies or 16 bit tif images and  

relies on Quicktime to convert them to 8 bit. The only format that I  

believe KIS handles in 16 bit is FITS files.

The only available Mac product that stacks and aligns 16 bit movies  

with 16+ bit processing end to end is Astro IIDC.

I just tried the alignment and stacking in Astro IIDC for the first time,

and I'm very impressed with its ease and quality!

Just to make sure, I want to select best pictures by hand, which I currently do 

by selecting frames and copying them to a new movie in 

QuickTime pro.  Will that preserve the 16 bit depth of movies using mpgs?

If not is there another way to do it?

AVIs are somewhat problematic on 10.4 since the AVI codec doesn't

work there yet.  But my laptop is still 10.3...

How does the group feel about the desirability of more dynamic range

in a monochrome camera, particularly for Lunar work?  Is it worth

several hundred dollars?

I feel it does, and especially for lunar. The moon has extreme  

contrast ranges and the wider the dynamic range of the Camera the  

more detail your going to capture. With the 8 bit cameras, I could  

not capture large images of the moon without either losing details in  

the darker shadowed areas or completely  blowing out the bright areas.

Thanks!  I'm getting pretty close to choosing the Flea...

--- more snipping ---

The main limitation with the Unibrain cameras are that they are noisy  

(both pixel and fixed pattern), have limited gain boosting (which is  

a good thing considering noise levels) and have a narrower dynamic  

range (the range problem is because of the TSLB15V01 processing  

chip). All cameras built that use the TSLB15V01 processing chip  

suffer form these problems.

Does this mean that the Imaging Source cameras will have better 

dynamic range than the fire-i in practice?  Can you quantify this?

I guess I wouldn't expect twice the dynamic range (= 1 bit), so 

it probably is not as good as 14 bits.

Hope That Helps..

Very much!  Thanks

Steve