Product Review: DMK 31AF03.AS FireWire Camera

Blogged by Jonathan Maron on September 25, 2007 and tagged with Reviews, Moon, Sun.

On his web site, Stern-Fan.de, Rolf Geissinger has published a review of the DMK 31AF03.AS FireWire camera. The review is written in German.

We have translated the main text of the review from German into English to make it accessible to our world wide audience.

Copyright information and source is cited at the end of the review.

Rolf Geissinger writes:

Digital Astrophotography With A FireWire Camera
(The Imaging Source DMK 31AF03.AS)

Right after you take this camera out of the box you will immediately notice that it is not some low cost consumer product, but a high quality industrial camera. The camera is very compact and its casing is entirely cast in metal.

The camera is connected to the computer via a IEEE 1394 interface, better known as FireWire. As long as you have a fast host PC, this interface allows data to be transferred at highest possible speed: Up to 30 monochrome images per second at 1024×768. That is a far cry from USB web cameras.

The monochrome CCD is extremely sensitive, so that you can easily work with short exposure times.

The driver installation ran without any problems. The capture software offers a wide range of useful features, but at the same time is easy to use and self-explanatory. The software offers a video mode and a single images mode, both of which can be automated (you can define the number of AVI frames that should be captured, time programming and image sequences).

[In Rolf's text, there are some product photos and specification here.]

Conclusion: This is certainly not a cheap camera, but extremely well suited to its main purpose. The ultimate camera for high resolution Moon, Sun and planet photography.

Source: http://www.stern-fan.de/Seiten/fotografie-firewire.htm

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