Image stabilised digital camera ? (1 Viewer)

Saw this advertised recently and wondered if it would have any useful applications as a camera for digiscoping.

It looks to have a reasonable spec, roughly on a par with the Canon A95

>I.S. Digital Camera<

It may be useable for digiscoping but a couple of things spring to mind. The first being with the camera having an external zoom, is it cable of taking a screw in adapter so that it can be mounted on a tripod? It's possible that ring with MEGA??? in red may screw off as it does with the larger Panasonic zoom models. If not then it may be still tripod mountable but I'd want it to have a metal tripod mount rather than a flimsy plastic one - that would need checking too.

The IS feature would likely be irrelevant unless hand holding the camera to the scope as usual advice when tripod mounting an IS camera/lens is that it has to be switched off.

With the camera having a 6x optical zoom, it may well need to be zoomed out to 4-5x in order to reduce vignetting - if so then at that amount of zoom it will likely be two powerful leading to very soft grainy images.

One of the plus points about the Contax, Kyocera, Nikon CP4500 and Canon A95 is the moveable LCD screen as the camera is often mounted at strange angles - the Panasonic doesn't have this feature.

Overall not having handled one, so it's hard to say for certain as to it's useability, I'd likely still be considering the other models mentioned first.

Do not rule out a camera with an external zoom. I was in the local hide one morning and a chap was using a very old Canon camera which he was digiscoping with. For the adaptor/reducer he used pieces of plastic pipe glued together to get the right sizes. It was very effective indeed.

Chris.

IanF said:

The IS feature would likely be irrelevant unless hand holding the camera to the scope as usual advice when tripod mounting an IS camera/lens is that it has to be switched off.

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Drat! ....and that's the main difference that I thought would be of some use. :C

I'll probably go for the Canon then.

Many thanks for a prompt and informative reply.

John P said:

Drat! ....and that's the main difference that I thought would be of some use. :C

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I think it also depends on the principle how the IS is implemented. Canon's version has motion sensors, which control a vari-angle prism to direct the image on the sensor. This is probably optimized for the focal lengths of the original optics and may not easily tolerate the significant increase (of the fl) with the scope. Minolta's AS (anti shake) has a different approach: it moves the whole sensor to compensate the image shift. If this detects the "shake" just by analyzing the image indormation, this should work regardless of focal length. Unfortunately I don't have any idea how Panasonic's IS works.

Having said this I also don't recommend the IS cameras for digiscoping. At least now this feature exists only in cameras with very long zooms, which are prone to vignetting and not easily fitted to scopes.

Regards,

Ilkka

Time to excavate an old chestnut.

Just as I was about to bin the attached I thought I'd post it as proof the Panasonic image stabilisation appears to work through a scope. Obviously I wouldn't normally use a x12 superzoom camera to digiscope but it was one of those afternoons when nothing much was happening and I was bored of photographing dragonflies, butterflies etc...Anyhow the camera was simply hand held up to the scope and the attached taken. I was expecting massive vignetting, some chromatic aberration and motion blur. Strangely I only got 2 out of 3

If anyone has a Panasonic Lumix FX01 (or similar model with x3 zoom lens and optical image stabilisation) if you've tried hand holding the camera to the scope please point me in the direction of your results.

Cheers

ikw101 said:

If anyone has a Panasonic Lumix FX01 (or similar model with x3 zoom lens and optical image stabilisation) if you've tried hand holding the camera to the scope please point me in the direction of your results.

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I have used an FX01 since last summer and I have been quite happy with it. I bought it mainly for other purposes than digiscoping (because of 28mm WA), but now it has completely replaced my CP4500 as a primary digiscoping camera. I have used it mainly with an adapter, but I can confirm that the O.I.S works very well when you hand hold the camera to the eyepiece. One small problem is that the FX01's zoom requires very little eye-relief and with most eyepieces you must hold the camera slightly behind the eyepiece or you may get exposure & vignetting problems. If you don't use an adaptor, it could be a good idea to have some kind of an alignment/centering ring/collar on the eyepiece to adjust the optimal distance. The weakest part of this camera is a noisy sensor and aggressive image processing, which produces yellowish colour blotches and loses resolution in low light/high ISOs (which you apparently are aware of ) - but other than that, the FX01 is a very nice digiscoping camera. If only the Fuji F30 had the FX01 optics...

I have some "test pics" in my gallery and I might find some more if I have time to look through my recent photo collection.

Best regards,

Ilkka