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Difference between cameras with the same sensor


Andy274

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So I never expected to generate this kind of debate when I posted my musing - I can say after a patchy night of imaging due to fabulous North West England weather & a full moon that the camera is a game changer.  

There are lots of images taken using flooding in & in now convinced that it is not worth spending the extra £400+ on the QHY or ZWO offerings given they need dessicant tablets & leak oil in the case of the ZWO.

In Steve's xbox tv analogy I kind of think it's established already that altair, qhy & zwo are the Samsung, LG & Sony equivalent so all are quality products.  Your lucky to have received your series x too - still waitng on mine 😒

 

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On 03/12/2020 at 07:50, Andy274 said:

... altair, qhy & zwo are the Samsung, LG & Sony equivalent

🤔 🙂 😇 

Still haven't encountered a single ASI2600 camera with oil on the sensor. If one day we do, we'll clean it free of charge.

On 03/12/2020 at 07:50, Andy274 said:

... the extra £400+ on the QHY or ZWO offerings

Currently the price difference (between the ToupTek and ZWO) is not £400+, it is £184. 

On 03/12/2020 at 07:50, Andy274 said:

Your lucky to have received your series x too - still waitng on mine 😒

I haven't received one either. Unfortunately nobody has an XBOX Seres X console in stock but Halo is delayed so I don't mind waiting 😁 

Steve 

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Have ZWO said anything about the 2600 design flaw though? 

It's all well and good buying from a retailer who will look after you, but forking out £2,000 of your hard earned money on an astro camera with the potential of something 'oily' leaking all over the sensor doesn't sit right with me at all.

I'd be interested to know what this lubricant even is and how on earth it manages to find it's way to seeping all over the sensor.

 

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3 minutes ago, smr said:

Have ZWO said anything about the 2600 design flaw though? 

It's all well and good buying from a retailer who will look after you, but forking out £2,000 of your hard earned money on an astro camera with the potential of something 'oily' leaking all over the sensor doesn't sit right with me at all.

I'd be interested to know what this lubricant even is and how on earth it manages to find it's way to seeping all over the sensor.

 

I looked on other forums, and it is a type of thermal grease/paste that is used to help transfer heat away from the sensor during cooling - much in the same way that you apply thermal grease between a computer CPU and heatsink.

All people who have experienced the issue have said they had no problems cleaning the lens (It seems that ZWO gave instructions on how they could do this, and did offer the users to RMA / Repair / Replace).

As FLO have already mentioned they have not had any reports or returns of the ASI2600 with this problem, it is most probably likely that the issue was restricted to a particular batch, and was caused by a faulty gloop machine which applies a dose of thermal paste during assembly. I suspect that none of that batch was shipped to the UK.

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3 hours ago, smr said:

Have ZWO said anything about the 2600 design flaw though? 

There is no design flaw. 

2 hours ago, gilesco said:

As FLO have already mentioned they have not had any reports or returns of the ASI2600 with this problem, it is most probably likely that the issue was restricted to a particular batch, and was caused by a faulty gloop machine which applies a dose of thermal paste during assembly. I suspect that none of that batch was shipped to the UK.

^ What he said 🙂 

Here in the UK we have not seen or heard of any ASI2600 cameras with oil on the sensor. 

Steve 

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On 03/12/2020 at 07:50, Andy274 said:

So I never expected to generate this kind of debate when I posted my musing - I can say after a patchy night of imaging due to fabulous North West England weather & a full moon that the camera is a game changer.  

There are lots of images taken using flooding in & in now convinced that it is not worth spending the extra £400+ on the QHY or ZWO offerings given they need dessicant tablets & leak oil in the case of the ZWO.

In Steve's xbox tv analogy I kind of think it's established already that altair, qhy & zwo are the Samsung, LG & Sony equivalent so all are quality products.  Your lucky to have received your series x too - still waitng on mine 😒

 

tbf the Altair 26C comes with Dessicant as well. Thought it was worth mentioning that as otherwise people might be spending £2k thinking it's some kind of magical astro camera which will never need them.

The price difference between the 26C and 2600 at the moment is about £90. Though the 2600 does have an offer on. 

 

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On 12/12/2020 at 09:26, smr said:

tbf the Altair 26C comes with Dessicant as well. Thought it was worth mentioning that as otherwise people might be spending £2k thinking it's some kind of magical astro camera which will never need them.

The price difference between the 26C and 2600 at the moment is about £90. Though the 2600 does have an offer on. 

 

No it doesn't come with dessicant tablets, sealed chamber & doesn't need them. I contacted the guys there to confirm

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  • 1 month later...

I'm loving my Hypercam 26C. Works great with Altair Capture and there has been a driver update for ASCOM gear so I am migrating to NINA. When I bought it the Altair was about £400 cheaper than the 2600. That has narrowed since I see. 

Having only had it a short while my processing is not necessarily optimal for the output of the camera, and I only stopped using a Nikon Z6 in the autumn, but my first two shots with the 26C are on astrobin at 

https://www.astrobin.com/full/scybuo/0/

https://www.astrobin.com/full/zv20wu/0/

both are OSC jobs - M31 with an IDAS NGS and the Rosette with the IDAS NB2. I'm using an offset of 32 and Gain 1 in Capture. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've just bought my first dedicated Astronomy Camera. I decided (after much thought!) to go with the ZWO 2600MC Pro, ordered from FLO because I'm  impressed with the customer service. Very excited! :)

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26 minutes ago, smr said:

I've just bought my first dedicated Astronomy Camera. I decided (after much thought!) to go with the ZWO 2600MC Pro, ordered from FLO because I'm  impressed with the customer service. Very excited! :)

Excellent! All the best with it.

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For anyone interested,  the 26C weighs just 620g. Pretty impressive when you consider the 2600mc weighs 700g and the 268c over 800g.

Ps - I got this piece of info direct from Altair over Fb messenger recently while researching whether to get an OSC or Mono. Their website lists just about every possible spec apart from the weight.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 2 months later...

For anyone still trying to decide between these two beasts, here's my experience....

After changing my order from the ZWO2600MM to the QHY268M back in April 2021 (due to the ZWO not being available until after July and QHY being available now)... I'm glad that the unavailability happened and I did opt for the QHY.

After over a year of use and about 35 images each being between 10 & 20 hours of exposure time per image... the QHY performed flawlessly, no driver issues, dew heater works very well as long as the QHY is allowed to heat the from glass (I give it about 15 minutes before cooling, more details below) and definitely no heat transfer grease (oil) leak issues... so far I'm loving the QHY268M.

Cooling the camera to -10C immediately after powering up during 80%+ humidity did fog the front glass, but letting the glass warm never gave me any dewing issues.
When it did dew over, all I did was warm the camera, waited 15 minutes than cooled it again and it was good all night.

 

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I don't think people realize that the dark current graphs of these chips are plotted on a logarithmic scale. There is no need to go to -10 or lower with these sensors, you are just wasting electricity. Cooling to 0 or -5 will usually be good enough.

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