The Imaging Source DFK 31AF03.AS

High Resolution, Fast Refresh Rate

The DFK 31AF03.AS unifies three important characteristics for astrophotography: high resolution, fast refresh rate and a low price. The camera ships with IC Capture.AS, a comprehensive software package with which you can capture lossless and uncompressed images sequences and write them to disk as AVI files, or as a series of singular bitmaps.

Color Interpolation

For visualization applications, it does not make sense to view the RAW image stream from the CCD chip. It must be interpolated, before it may be viewed or saved in common formats. IC Capture.AS perform color interpolation, thus reducing the load on the DFK 31AF03.AS's processor. Should, on the other hand, you prefer that the camera itself performs color interpolation, you can select the appropriate option in IC Capture.AS. This enables the transfer of data to reach the camera's maximum of 30 FPS. Finally, if you do not require color interpolation at all, you can turn it off completely and the image stream is written to disk in RAW format.

Sony ICX204AK 1/3 " CCD Chip

The DFK 31AF03.AS ships with the color Sony ICX204AK progressive scan CCD chip. With its 1/3 " format, the CCD chip produces a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. Even at very long exposure times - up to 60 minutes exposure are possible - noise is minimal. Thanks to this extremely high quality, the Sony ICX204AK CCD chip is also often used in other scientific, industrial and medical image processing applications.

IR Cut Filter As Standard

Unlike the human eye, CCD chips are sensitive to near infrared light (wavelengths over 700 nm). The DFK 31AF03.AS ships with an IR cut filter as standard and is thus suited to applications in which these wavelengths would lead to interference or undesirable results.

High Speed Data Transfer Via FireWire

In order to transfer the vast amount of data created by the stream of uncompressed and lossless color images to the host PC, you need a very high speed bus. Hence, the DFK 31AF03.AS is fitted with a fast FireWire connector.

Included Software

The DFK 31AF03.AS ships with the device driver IC WDM DCAM TIS and the camera control and image acquisition application IC Capture.AS. Both of these run on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit).

Software for Mac OS and Linux is available from third parties.