A) Has anyone on the list been recently shopping for one? Any
strong recommendations on places to check out, or to avoid?
Bought mine here in Oz, so I can't help you there. But some observations:
B) Has anyone that has one run into critical problems that made them
decide that it wasn't really worth the money after all?
The GPS works well; though don't expect it to work that well indoors. It
will work in my house (not that I use it here, for security), though it can
take quite a long time to get a lock - if I wander in from outside it
maintains it ok though. Recently in some galvanised iron shed type
buildings, I couldn't get a lock. Nonetheless, pretty happy with the GPS
side of it.
The astrotracer function is interesting, and works well within its
limitations. But some (silly, to me) decisions with the software
implementation limit it a little.
Specifically:
* No ability to do any sort of multi-exposure for layering. Most
astrophotographers will take multiple short exposures rather than one long
one, for noise and dynamic range benefits. You can do a nice 3min exposure,
but you can't do over the same astro-track, say, 60 x 1sec exposures, each
with DFS (or not).
* There is also no way to get it to do multiple traced frames in sequence;
note this is different to the previous point where I wanted to do multi
exposure in one trace, this is to do a time-lapse of lots of astrotraced
shots to put together in a video. The astro trace function only works in
its own custom menu, so there's no way to use the intervalometer with it.
Right, I thought, I can use an external interval remote with it on
bulb/astrotrace - but that doesn't work either, because for an astrotrace
shot, you don't push the shutter release, you press OK.
Like I said, silly little implementation decisions that severely (for me)
limit the flexibility of the function; which is frustrating considering the
function *does* work well otherwise.
- Peter
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