Camera upgrade

[drumsolo]

I am looking to upgrade my current unmodified Canon 1100d to either a full frame DSLR such as Canon 6D or a dedicated CCD camera. I have just across the ZWO cameras and I am interested in these but don't know enough about the differences I would get from a more expensive full frame DSLR and one of these. I would prefer a colour CCD camera so I don't have to take lots of different filter exposures but would this produce far inferior results?
My budget is around £1000 so I really want to get the most I can from this, any help would be really appreciated to help me decide. 

[GTom]

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I would prefer a colour CCD camera so I don't have to take lots of different filter exposures but would this produce far inferior results?

OSC (one-shot color) cameras are always ~2EV behind the monochrome solution based on the same sensor+microlens array. This means, working with a decent monochrome sensor you can save half the exposure time compared to the OSC counterpart. Furthermore, you can play with a full L-channel collecting all photons between 400 and 700nm boosting your overall S/N while spending less on the individual R/G/B channels.

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budget is around £1000

That's an important parameter. Depending on your targets, I'd recommend either going full mono with the ASI1600mmc or staying OSC and get a canon 6D. The deciding factor is how much real estate you want.

 

 

[michael8554]

Hi drumsolo

Have you read the post "Sensor size, resolution, field of view..." ?

Will your OTA fully illuminate a full-frame DSLR's sensor, or will you get vignetting?

Michael

 

 

 

 

[drumsolo]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for pointing this out I wasnt aware of this issue. It is never straight forward! Would the vingetting be much worse than using my aps-c sensor? Assuming I can remove this by taking flats?

Thanks

Stuart

[swag72]

Here's my thoughts on a OSC camera having borrowed a friends for a while. I use mono and so with the right filters you can really cut through a lot of light pollution issues (including the moon!). I have just posted an image I took with an almost full moon and a 3nm Ha filter, with a OSC I'd bet you'd get next to nothing showing under those conditions. 

When I had the OSC I found that it was pretty poor in data collection when the moon was about, so you can in effect almost wipe out 2 weeks a month of data capture. What's the chances that the two weeks of ideal conditions will be clear and the moon nights will be cloudy?  Murphys law will take care of that for sure  

For me it would be mono all of the way...... a filter wheel and a good capture programme means that you could rotate through the coloured filters all night and end up with colour data at the end of a run.

[Xplode]

With your budget a 6D is your best choice, if will of course have heavy vignetting which can be fixed with flats. Another consern is the fully corrrected FOV of your coma corrector...but...any uncorrected parts can just be cropped away.

A mono CCD/CMOS would of course be better, but you would end up with a tiny sensor on that budget because you need camera, filter wheel and filters. Filters and filter wheel for an ok sized sensor will eat up most of your budget.

A color CCD doesn't seem to be any better than a DSLR, you will very rarely see people produce good images with that kind of camera so i don't see any point in getting one.

 

If you're going for a 6D i suggest you wait till next year because the 6D II is coming out so 6D prices will go down allowing more people to buy this great DSLR for astroimaging

[Singlin]

The new 6d will be coming out soon.

[geordie85]

There is a mono ccd with a similar sensor size to your current dslr in the classifieds for about your budget at the moment.

I use one and I'm very happy with it, it's a tad noisy but that can be over come with plenty subs. 

Here's my latest photo taken with this camera.

[Xplode]

14 minutes ago, Singlin said:

The new 6d will be coming out soon.

Late spring/summer is estimated release time.

14 minutes ago, geordie85 said:

There is a mono ccd with a similar sensor size to your current dslr in the classifieds for about your budget at the moment.

I use one and I'm very happy with it, it's a tad noisy but that can be over come with plenty subs. 

Here's my latest photo taken with this camera.

Atik 383L+?

It says nothing about filters/filter wheel so i guess it's sold without.

Having to buy those would put the cost way above the £1000 budget.

[GTom]

20 minutes ago, Singlin said:

The new 6d will be coming out soon.

Depending on pricing, the mkII can bring down the mkI prices a bit. Otherwise I doubt the new model would smash the current offering (6D, nikon D600, sony a7s) in AP: even if canon finally makes its move away from their 500nm process, then they'll probably go along the MegaPixel marketing, and use up all the improvement to squeeze more pixels on the sensor. Besides, the 6D line is not that expensive that they'd put a groundbreaking miracle sensor in it (stacked BSI anyone?).