Camera or laptop

[geordie85]

I'm running a fresh set of flats as the ones I took last night didn't remove all the dust bunnies. 

It took 34 seconds to take and download a 1 second flat. Is my laptop just too slow or could it be something to do with the camera? 

My camera is a qhy183c and my laptop is an Acer ES 15.

I'm not very savvy when it comes to technology so any and all "dumbed down" advice will be greatly appreciated. 

If it is the laptop, are there any recommendations for a fast, not overly expensive laptop that will perform quicker?

Thanks

[Tim]

They create large files, but I think I read somewhere that the problems may lie within the USB bus architecture of the laptop combined with the method of transfer used by the camera.

Some cameras have extra DDR memory which seems to mitigate the issue somewhat.

I have an Atik 11000 which creates 22mb files and takes a little while to download them. The Atik Horizon however, on the same laptop, using USB 2.0 tech, is much faster, despite the files being 32mb. The Horizon has its own memory, like the ZWO 1600 Pro. I dont know about the QHY cameras.

If nothing pops up on here, you could try the Altair Astro user help groups, as they/Touptek have a couple of IMX183 models.

[EyeGuy]

1 hour ago, geordie85 said:

I'm running a fresh set of flats as the ones I took last night didn't remove all the dust bunnies. 

It took 34 seconds to take and download a 1 second flat. Is my laptop just too slow or could it be something to do with the camera? 

My camera is a qhy183c and my laptop is an Acer ES 15.

I'm not very savvy when it comes to technology so any and all "dumbed down" advice will be greatly appreciated. 

If it is the laptop, are there any recommendations for a fast, not overly expensive laptop that will perform quicker?

Thanks

Looking at the specs for the camera and the laptop, it doesn’t look like the camera is at fault. It has a fast usb 3.0 interface so should download quickly. That leaves the computer or the usb drivers.

That laptop has 2 usb 2.0 ports and 1 usb 3 port. It should have a blue colour to distinguish it. Is the camera plugged into that one?

Barry

[Oddsocks]

1 hour ago, geordie85 said:

I'm not very savvy when it comes to technology so any and all "dumbed down" advice will be greatly appreciated. 

Looking at the (sixteen) variants of the Acer Aspire ES15 in the Acer support web pages it appears that most (all?) have only one high speed USB3 port and two standard speed USB2 ports.

Your camera is designed to use the high speed USB3 port and will take up to ten times longer to download an image if it is plugged into a USB2 port by mistake.

Make sure that you are using the cameras supplied USB3 cable and that it is plugged into the laptops USB3 port which is normally coloured blue.

Edit: Looks like Barry was able to find the Acer specs quicker than me 

[pipnina]

What determines how fast the image saves from the camera to the laptop is the weakest link in the chain. These links are (probably)

1: any internal storage the camera saves the image to first

2: the speed of the connection between the camera and the computer.

3: the speed of the storage medium being saved to on the laptop end. (in most laptops, this is a 5400rpm hard disk. These can be absolute rubbish and would take some time to transfer a 25mb file compared to almost any other medium.)

 

Looking at the specs and price point of the Acer Aspire ES15, I would strongly suspect the last point.

As a test, have system monitor (task manager) open and looking at the disk usage graph. Then take a photo with the camera and transfer it over. If the drive spends most of those 30 odd seconds pinned at 100% we know the culprit.

As a general rule, I avoid cheap laptops like the plague. I have never seen one that is worth buying in the long term unless you absolutely could not afford anything better. Usually laptops come into their own around the £600-700 range. Sounds a lot (and it is) but you get a whole computer complete with keyboard, mouse, wifi, bluetooth, a battery, a camera and a screen. It all adds up and when you buy the whole package at £250 you wind up with all of those components being bottom-of-the-bin tier.

If the hard drive is the problem, the easiest and cheapest way to fix it is to pick up an SSD from amazon and replace the drive with it. Compared to what's in there already I'd bet money on it being an improvement irrespective of camera transfer performance.

[geordie85]

Thanks for all the replies and just for clarity I was connected via the USB 3 port.

The wife bought me the laptop a while ago and unfortunately she's like me, clueless about computers. 

I don't mind spending money on something that's going to do the job well and quickly, just as long as it's not stupidly expensive.

[Tim]

As it goes, when reviewing one of the 183 cameras a while back, I noted that there wasn't a massive difference between download times using USB 2 v USB 3.

What does happen though, is that short exposures like flats, seem to build up a backlog of data to transfer and can even cause the laptop to black screen. The same was true for short exposure planetary stuff, the fps gradually slows.

Im trying to locate the information I read about the issue, will come back to you if / when I do.