On Sep 11, 2011, at 6:24 PM, Peter Loveday wrote: >> 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.
That's fine. Most of the time I'd do perfectly well with a GPS tagged shot of the outside of the building. > > 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). DFS? The lack of multiple exposures seems annoying. Could it have something to do with the movement limitations of the sensor? > > * 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. That sounds very annoying. This is one of those cases where you should be able to connect it to an external device (smartphone, camera etc.) and have access to every feature. > > 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. I did a quick bit of shopping around and ran into another annoying limitation. They don't seem to be currently available. Except for one that is being sold at approximately twice list price: http://www.langtoninfo.com/showitem.aspx?isbn=0027075189003 > > - Peter > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
