When I talked to OPT about planetary imagers they steered me away from the Orion Starshoot line and suggested I go with the Imaging Source planetary CCD cameras. They start at $350 and I really like the images that I've seen so far. I've seen a few on Astromart for $275. I think Orion needs to improve these cameras from what I've read of the reviews. Debbie On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:
I purchased and received an Orion Starshoot IV LPI camera - the only LPI - light weight guiding type camera that I could find advertised on the market as certified full Windows 64 bit compatible. This post just contains some quick initial notes on this LPI.
The Starshoot IV driver installed as a true 64-bit device and operates like historical LPIs. The camera came with a "64-bit" version of the AmCap capture software, which in fact installs as 32-bit software. My 32 bit AmCap software from 2001 was also installed on a Windows 7 Professional OS and it also connects and reads the 64-bit Starshoot. The Starshoot IV communicates with PHD. I have not yet installed K3CCD but anticipate that it will see the Starshoot without problems.
I have not yet taken any images with the Starshoot. It's a functional camera, but I'm not impressed with its design.
The Starshoot IV has the chip embedded and inaccessible almost a full 35mm inside the camera housing instead of at the more typical 11mm behind the camera housing. The Starshoot IV has an integrated and unremovable IR filter. (The IR filter sits in a sealed barrel sticking up out of the camera. A "fake" 1 1/4 inch barrel screws around the outside of this inner barrel.)
This design means in some applications it will be difficult to match the plane of the CMOS chip with the focal plane. It also means that when used parafocal with a small flip mirror, the eyepiece will have to sit on an extender at an absurd height above the flip mirror.
Murphy's law governs such things, and of course, the camera was delivered with a knick defect on the inside of the IR filter.
Finally, the advantage of the more expensive full 1 1/4" IR filters is that when they get dirty and scratched, you can replace them. With the StarShoot integrated filter design, you get to throw out the camera.
Presumably this integrated IR filter design, which is only 1/4" in diameter, was meant to lower production costs by only using a mini-IR filter.
Finally, the integrated IR filter lowers the camera's utility as a guider camera with PHD. For guiding applications you pull out the IR filter to make the camera more sensitive and get a little extra limited magnitude reach.
But at 1.3M bytes on the CMOS chip and a $100 price point, it will be interesting to see if the planetary images are improved over my circa 2004 Celestron NexStar.
Clear Skies - Kurt
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