SIGMA SD10 DigiCam any good?

Is the Sigma SD10 any good? It looks better than the Canon 10D and has 4
more megapixels and cost less than the 10D....any comments?

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 11:54:24 -0600, "Edward Nash" wrote:

Is the Sigma SD10 any good? It looks better than the Canon 10D and has 4
more megapixels and cost less than the 10D....any comments?

This uses the Foveon sensor. Although the noise has been improved, it is still a
very poor sensor for astronomical imaging. First, the noise is still very high
compared to the Canon sensor (note that the camera offers a 30 second maximum
shutter speed). Second, while all color sensors are marginal for astroimaging,
this one is particularly poor, with a good deal of crosstalk between color
channels. This is corrected for by some tricky internal image processing
algorithms, but don't look for them to help with astronomical targets.

Unless you have exceptional optics, the pixel count difference is of minor
importance; even the 10D has more than you can use in many optical
configurations. In the meantime, the 10D (or the 300D if you want to save some
money- it's only about $850 for the body) is the way to go for digicam
astronomical imaging.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Chris L Peterson wrote:
Unless you have exceptional optics, the pixel count difference is of minor
importance; even the 10D has more than you can use in many optical
configurations. In the meantime, the 10D (or the 300D if you want to save
some money- it's only about $850 for the body) is the way to go for digicam
astronomical imaging.

What is the difference between the 10D and the 300D?

Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt

The major astronomical usage of cameras like
the 10D/300D is deep sky imaging, with typical exposures of around 5 minutes.
For long exposures like that, mirror lockup isn't necessary.


What have you been able to capture in 5 minutes with this setup?

Roland Christen

On 08 Mar 2004 20:55:17 GMT, (Chris1011) wrote:

What have you been able to capture in 5 minutes with this setup?

Not much. I experimented with my 300D for long exposures, and found that 300
seconds was relatively free of noise. I don't use the camera for deep-sky
imaging because it is color (and I have an ST8i, which is much better). The
majority of imagers using this camera are using 300 second subexposures, which
seems to yield quite good results.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

What have you been able to capture in 5 minutes with this setup?

An example here :

http://www.astrosurf.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/002530.html

Comments are in french but the image is worth it.

This seems to be 20 images of 300 seconds stacked.

Wondering what 1 image looks like...

jon

lid wrote:
Chris1011 wrote:
The major astronomical usage of cameras like
the 10D/300D is deep sky imaging, with typical exposures of around 5
minutes. For long exposures like that, mirror lockup isn't necessary.


What have you been able to capture in 5 minutes with this setup?

An example here :

http://www.astrosurf.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/002530.html



I've said it before, and I'll say it again,
WOW!


DaveL