New Camera UK Exclusive

[Guest AstronomyShed]

Thought this may be of interest to some of you. :-

I believe this is a UK exclusive for the shed, QHY have been promising a planetary cam for some time, and althought it's release was announced earlier in the year it's had some delays, however, this morning the nice man from DHL brought me this delivery from China :-

Introducing the QHY IMG132E

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

It's a very, VERY solidly built piece of kit, as you can see from the images I added a clipper lighter for scale, it's an all metal construction and with regards solidity, for anyone familiar with Tal x3 barlows, it's in a similar vein, so don't drop it on your foot. Not that it's over heavy though, it just feels like a nice, solid, dependable piece of kit and just says quality.

It uses a C mount adapter which has yet to arrive, when it does and we get some clear sky you can count on some results posted from this, it's USB2 and has a red led beside the USB 'B' socket to indicate it's running.

SOFTWARE

It uses it's own software, possibly made for other forthcoming products and after testing it on the desktop it seems quite intuitive and user friendly, the addition of a live histogram is an advantage not only helping you achieve some balance, but if you overdo such as the gain control, it's immediately viewable as the histogram goes awry and comb shaped, this should help anyone who tends to be a bit heavy handed with gain on webcams.

TECH SPEC

Well this will be a surprise for some as it's CMOS, not CCD, but it's next generation Sony IMX035 CMOS exmor sensor. and is 1.3 megapixel. It also has a 32 megabyte sdram buffer built into the unit to smooth things out a little.

Framerates are a VERY respectable 23/24 fps at 1280*1024, if debayerd, if not debayered, it gives 25FPS, at 640 x 480 it gives a staggering.... wait for it...... EIGHTY SIX frames per second!

Total number of pixels Approx. 1.49M (1384H × 1076V)

Number of effective pixels Approx. 1.39M (1329H × 1049V)

Chip size 7.64 mm (H) × 7.64 mm (V)

This is one fast camera! A UK price hasn't been announced yet however, as for real world performance and results, watch this space, but what i've seen of it so far impresses me.

Edited December 7, 2011 by AstronomyShed

[Guest]

Hi Dion

Looks a nice bit of Kit Is the housing cast Ali? If it is it would make it nice and easy to add a extra cooling fan or heat sink or both even..

You say no UK price has been published yet was this a sample from them or via the company in the east that will be producing them If so what did it cost? <Grin>

I could have sent you a C/CS adaptor I have made them for 1 1/4" 2" even one to fit my Nikon lenses plus I have plenty of manual CCtv lenses knocking about

Andy

[Guest AstronomyShed]

Hi Andy, I have built 'relationships' with a couple of the manufacturers, QHY being one, this is a pre prod sample sent to me from China, yes it's a cast ally casing, but when you see the results i think you may agree that it doesn't need cooling, also Mr Qhy says because it's cmos it doesn't need cooling, i'll post a couple of sample images in a mo.

[Guest AstronomyShed]

OK, bear in mind that tonight Wed 7th, the country is being battered by hail storms, high winds, various storm conditions and a lot of cloud. Determined to give it a go, I set up the ED80 as it wouldn't be bounced about by the wind, so, not really the tool for the job and absolutely horrendous conditions produced these, all with a x3 tal barlow on the ED80, so seriously pushing it in bad conditions :-

Edited December 8, 2011 by AstronomyShed

[Guest]

Did you move the photos Dion?

[Guest AstronomyShed]

Arghh, yes, I'd placed them in my jupiter album by accident, fixing them now.

[Guest JohnC]

_{Really like this camera, put me on the list for one}

Edited December 8, 2011 by JohnC

[Guest AstronomyShed]

I really like it too, the software, although intuitive and user friendly, does need a little tweaking. When these finally come out, Bern at Modern Astronomy is the UK QHY agent. I have no idea yet though of what the price point will be.

Edited December 8, 2011 by AstronomyShed

[Guest AstronomyShed]

This is a quick grab of the software in action and the live view, the capture rate is a bit juddery as because of grabbing i was basically producing two HD avi files simultaniously, one being the screen grab and one being the moon imaging.

http://www.youtube.com/user/astronomyshed?feature=mhee#p/a/u/0/swyH3-28T-o

Edited December 8, 2011 by AstronomyShed

[Craig]

Looks very smart.

[Guest]

very good photos and very sharp with the state of the weather we have had of late.. Well impressed

[Guest AstronomyShed]

I'm expecting good things from this, but I need it to clear and a decent amount of time, because it's 16 bit at 1280 x 1024 at it's highest res, i do hit the 2 gig windows limit on AVI's which sounds a lot but isn't, in fact it gives approx 480 frames, for lunar or planetary I'd prefer to take around 1200, however, it will also record in bmp and png and and FITS, but one that interests me is is also will record in SER format which in simple terms is RAW AVI, it doesn't have the limits of AVI although it does need to be debayered, I've managed to test this and it works fine in registax 5 but I can't seem to get 6 to play nice,

[Guest AstronomyShed]

Tonight, although the weather said it was going to be clear, we still had a lot of cloud but the winds had dropped, so i set up my Sky-Watcher 200p and tried the camera in that with a x2 barlow, the first results were bad and the image came out like this :-

I scratched my head for a while and then loaded the mono raw avi into virtualdub and took out a bad segment then restacked and tuned in photoshop, I also reduced it a little as I think it improves it :-

[Celeste]

Looks to be a good little camera

[Guest AstronomyShed]

The proper test will be on Jupiter when conditions allow, watch this space

[Guest JohnC]

Looking forward to seeing the results.

[Craig]

I also look forward to see them.

[Guest AstronomyShed]

Forgot to post this one on here, this was actually taken again in poor conditions, jupiter fading in and out on the avi with cloud, as a result this is only about 306 frames stacked and taken with the 200P with a celestron ultima x2. As you can see, the larger range of the camera means that grabbing moons as well as jupe without having to do composites is easy.

Edited December 19, 2011 by AstronomyShed

[Craig]

That's superb.

[Guest AstronomyShed]

For such poor conditions it's very very good, it's a bit noisy and pre processing it had a slight 'issue, which I've corrected but that was a result of having one of the camera settings a tad high, since it's so new there's no manual, but i think that's also contributed to the noise. However there's no doubt now of it's potential and I'll post more when conditions allow. But it really is a quality lump of kit, in fact i took it to the shed do last week and Noel gave it a looking at, definitely no reservations about it re build quality.

[Guest AstronomyShed]

A few more with the new cam

[glider]

Oh, yes.

[red dwalf]

very nice and clear images

[+Rusty Strings]

Almost like being there

[Guest AstronomyShed]

I'm hoping to do the full rundown/review video on this on either Monday or Tuesday so i'll embed it into this thread when it's done. My overall opinion is that it's the next step up from a webcam, it's colour, not too complicated and beautifully built.

In effect it's a competitor to the Imaging source stuff, at a competitive price and quite possibly better

Edited January 7, 2012 by AstronomyShed