SPC900 image capture problems in Sharpcap - help!

[Martin-Devon]

Finally managed to flash the Morgans supplied SPC800 to become a SPC900 on an XP run PC. Loaded Wcrmac and Sharpcap onto my Windows 7 run PC, then downloaded the driver for the SPC900 from the link supplied by Morgans computer website.

The webcam works - I can see images fine on the Sharpcap screen - but it absolutely refuses to capture any images. At the bottom of the Sharpcap screen it says "Camera driver cannot support capture information" and when I press the "start capture" button it just comes up with error. Sharpcap is fine though with the inbuilt webcam on my PC and will capture images - the problem is just with the SPC900 webcam.

Any tips or ideas how to solve this would be much appreciated. It's taken me hours to get to this stage & I'm completely stuck how to fix this.

Thanks,

Martin

[Bizibilder]

I had a similar problem - the camera was there as was the driver etc. But they weren't talking!! I went into device manager and found the camera. Right click on it (I think!!) and there is a troubleshooter option (or similar name!!) use that to relink the camera to the driver ( you might have to fiddle about as I'm on win 7 but the idea should be the same if you see what I mean??) - worked for me!

[Martin-Devon]

Hi Bizibilder - I did as you suggested, right clicked on the webcam under device manager, selected the troubleshooter tab and ran it, but this did not cure the problem. It says the SPC900 driver is working properly, but although I can see the images I still cannot capture them.

[Davie]

have you tried different capture software?

[sengoksa]

I had problems with capture with my spc 900 and sharpcap

no idea why... installed craterlet and it works perfect...

[mallorcasaint]

Delete the SPC900 drivers and then reinstall them. Worked for me!

[TheThing]

Have you selected the correct camera from the drop down menu?

[Martin-Devon]

OK - sorted it now. Bizibilder was right, since I right clicked everything I could find where the SPC900 was installed, re-ran the troubleshooter tabs several times, then rebooted. Much to my amazement it then worked. It's odd though since the message at the bottom of my Sharpcap screen now says "Camera driver cannot report capture information" - remember, before it said it could not "capture" the information so this has changed somehow to cannot "report", however, when I now click the Start Capture tab it works, I can capture a video and it plays back OK.

Have no idea really exactly what I did, but thanks again to Bizibilder for pointing me in the right directions.

Now, after more than 12 hours to get to this stage, I can now start the tricky bit, downloading Registax and then trying to get to grips with all of the settings, and trying to see if I can get any of this to actually work via the telescope.

If anybody has any tips on what settings to use to get good image capture of the Moon or Jupiter I'd be very grateful; as you know when you up up Sharpcap there are dozens of settings you can tweak and what is right for daytime imaging is probably totally different from night-time telescope planetary imaging - so any settings information would be much much appreciated.

Thanks everybody

[Bizibilder]

There are a couple of really good video tutorials over on the "Astronomy Shed" website - well worth a look. I also found a tutorial for Registax here:

RegiStax- Free image processing software

And a swift Google should turn up others.

Apologies for not suggesting a reboot!!!!! (Actually I'm just glad my memory worked well enough to help!)