From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: November 16, 2006 12:57:52 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: new firewire Italian camera

Hi Alan;

On 16-Nov-06, at 10:41 AM, Alan Friedman wrote:

Hi -

It will be interesting to follow what develops from this.

Yep.

As many of you probably know, Paolo (in addition to being a very active and skilled lunar and planetary observer and imager) was a distributor of Lumenera cameras and is also making his rail telescope design (optimized for long focal length planetary imaging) available to the amateur community.

At one point he attempted to explore with Lumenera the possibilities of Mac operation of their cameras.

I worked with the founders of Lumenera and including all the VP's and chief engineering people when we all worked at Vitana / PixelLink in Ottawa.

And I know about adding support for their cameras to the Mac and have dealt with Lumenera on cost estimates. The bottom line is that there simply are not enough Mac sales to justify the cost of doing the work, so it isn't going to happen as a commercial product.

In fact, Astro IIDC should never have been built - it simply makes no sense economically to do it or even continue with it as there simply are not enough Mac users to buy software. Other than video or audio and maybe some PhotoShop usage, there are no other perceived uses for a Mac. And With BootCamp and MacIntel, basically Mac specialty software is going to "poof" and disappear off the market as people just switch over to Windows software.

So it is not a great picture going forward.

I do talk with Paolo from time to time - I will ask him to keep us posted on the development of his new camera, as this one seems to have a real potential for operation on a Mac platform with Astro IIDC.

That's assuming he follows the IIDC specification exactly. It isn't trivial to do this and I hope he hires a good team of electrical and software engineers. When we did projects like these building a camera from scratch (Pulnix for example), the costs were in the $200,000 to $500,000 USD per camera model, especially after you add all all the government regulation testing so you can get certified (FCC, CE, FCI etc.).

TTYL..

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