From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: November 21, 2005 11:59:30 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

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

Hi Steve;

On 21-Nov-05, at 11:13 PM, Steve Bryson wrote:

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.

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

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

The next version is better.

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.

That works if you just copy and paste each frame into a new movie and then do a Save As. It will preserve the 16 bit nature of the movie. If you recompress the movie into another format it will drop to 8 bit.

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

MPEG is a horrible lossy format. It's fine for showing people your end product, but it's really bad for a format.

If not is there another way to do it?

That is the correct way.

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

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

I'm not sure what your saying here. Your monochrome camera should not needed any other codecs for QuickTime movies. The bayer codec is only needed if your playing back color movies recorded with Astro IIDC.

---------SNIPPED----

> 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?

It will be somewhat better for monochrome cameras.

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.

It actually will be 1 bit better than the 640x480 Unibrain or the earlier Imaging Source 21F04 series. There is a flaw in the TSLB15V01 chip set that Texas Instruments developed. Basically the TSLB15V01 chip delivers 7 bits and you get a range of values from 0 to 254, but as gapped pairs of values.

For color this isn't too bad as you wind up with 2,097,152 colors instead of 16,777,216 colors.

However for monochrome 8 (weird 7) bit you can wind up with coarse banding because intermediate shades get absorbed into adjacent shades.

The Imaging Source's new 640x480 cameras (21BF04 or 21AF04) don't use the TSLB15V01 chip set, so they don't have that problem at all, nor do most higher end cameras.

HTH..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com