Marnix Praet has send us the following review of one of our USB astronomy cameras. As Marnix’s primary language is not English, I have taken the liberty of correcting some of his text. The corrections took place at a linguistic level and not a content level. The review has also been slightly shortened into a blog-sized post.

Marnix writes:

First Impression Of New DMK USB 2.0 Camera

I am very pleased with the concept of a USB DMK camera. I have tested it on the almost full moon at rates between 15 and 60 fps and I have not lost one single frame - fantastic!

The software works fine by me. No complains about that.

The camera offers some good features: a nice histogram settings panel, while you are taking AVI’s. The noise reduction - a super feature for bad seeing conditions - great!

One small point: If you use noise reduction, you may see a raster on your image after processing with RegiStax.

The software is great. It works fine, without freezing and I have no bugs found for now.

The chip is a little on the small size, but its sensitivity is enormous.

I have taken some shots of the moon with my Meade apo and have tried out different filters, such as IR PRO, IR blocking, H-alpha.

This USB camera is a breakthrough for astrophotographers, who wish to capture the Moon and planets. It was a great experience and a pleasure to work with such a good camera (USB 2.0) and great software.

And a fantastic first night out.

Marnix Praet

Following our recent blog post on powering astronomy cameras in the field, Oldfield So of Hong Kong has written down his experiences on cabling and mobile power supplies.

Oldfield writes:

DMK camera uses standard 6-pin 1394 power to connect to the computer, these type of cable will also carry 12V DC for the DMK. However, some notebook PC, despite having 6-pin ports, might not deliver power if they’re in battery mode. Therefore, you will need something else to provide power for the DMK.

Read the rest of his blog post for the full story.

Dan Kaplan, an astronomy customer in Kensington, Maryland and an avid DMK user since January of this year, has produced numerous images with the mono, the color and the raw Bayer cameras available on AstronomyCameras.com. Dan sent a couple of Saturn shots to me a few days ago that I thought all would enjoy.

Additionally, he has great things to say about our cameras!

Although I’ve had a DMK camera (and the DBK 31 AF03.AS) for just a few months, I’ve been involved with planetary imaging for several years. I’ve been primarily using a ToUcam Pro webcam and have been impressed with the results, but decided to step up to a better camera to try to eek out a bit of additional detail. Simply put, I was amazed at the results I could achieve with the DMK camera. It’s really in a different league from other cameras I’ve tried. Since getting the camera, my skies have been consistently mediocre, with very few nights of even fairly steady seeing, and the transparency has been, well, lousy. So, I haven’t been using the DMK under ideal conditions, but, even so, I’ve gotten images much better than anything I could do in the past. Not only with the ToUcam, but other cameras as well, some costing a good deal more than the DMK.

I have attached three images. The first one, of Saturn, taken with a 7″ TMB apochromatic refractor, has the most detail of any Saturn image I’ve taken.

The second picture of Saturn is taken with a 3.5″ Questar. The Questar has really sharp optics, but it’s still a 3.5″ scope. Although conventional wisdom says that you’re just not going to get much detail, to my surprise, the Saturn image is the sharpest one I’ve seen yet using the 3.5 and looks much like images using the Questar 7.

And the moon picture…just as impressive.

Dan Kaplan, Kensington, MD

On his web site, Stern-Fan.de, Rolf Geissinger has published a review of the DMK 31AF03.AS FireWire camera. The review is written in German.

We have translated the main text of the review from German into English to make it accessible to our world wide audience.

Copyright information and source is cited at the end of the review.

Rolf Geissinger writes:

Digital Astrophotography With A FireWire Camera
(The Imaging Source DMK 31AF03.AS)

Right after you take this camera out of the box you will immediately notice that it is not some low cost consumer product, but a high quality industrial camera. The camera is very compact and its casing is entirely cast in metal.

The camera is connected to the computer via a IEEE 1394 interface, better known as FireWire. As long as you have a fast host PC, this interface allows data to be transferred at highest possible speed: Up to 30 monochrome images per second at 1024×768. That is a far cry from USB web cameras.

The monochrome CCD is extremely sensitive, so that you can easily work with short exposure times.

The driver installation ran without any problems. The capture software offers a wide range of useful features, but at the same time is easy to use and self-explanatory. The software offers a video mode and a single images mode, both of which can be automated (you can define the number of AVI frames that should be captured, time programming and image sequences).

[In Rolf's text, there are some product photos and specification here.]

Conclusion: This is certainly not a cheap camera, but extremely well suited to its main purpose. The ultimate camera for high resolution Moon, Sun and planet photography.

Source: http://www.stern-fan.de/Seiten/fotografie-firewire.htm

Not only do The Imaging Source cameras “play well with Vista”, they also perform better than expected when the seeing is less! As an update to the previous blog regarding a new DBK 21AF04.AS user, Joel from Amarillo, Texas writes:

Below is a post I made to the Cloudy Nights forum. Seeing was not anywhere close to what was forecast. But, I thought The Imaging Source community might like to see the post and the result. This [DBK 21AF04.AS] is one amazing camera!

Read The Imaging Source post in its entirety on the Cloudy Nights forum.