Ian,
Sorry you were disappointed with the P300.
I was surprised to hear that you had to use the camera at full zoom to eliminate vignetting. This would be the main reason that images would appear to be "not as clean as I had hoped ". The lens is not Nikon ED glass so suffers over about half zoom. The camera is certainly not as "eyepiece friendly" as the F31 which was one of the best ever for minimizing vignetting.
I don't have a Swarovski 20-60 zoom on hand but I just ran the camera on the Kowa 20-60x zoom using the Swarovski UCA. The best case is about 50 % zoom at 60x which drops back to 80% zoom at 20x. I would suspect the Swarovski would be similar if not slightly better. I use the zoom mostly at 60x as I want lot's of magnification with digicams.
There are lot's of good cameras out there these days and most can be "made" to digiscope so I will be interested to hear what you find.
The Nikon P6000 will give better results than the P300 but is much slower and doesn't have Continuous Self-timer either. No Nikons do unfortunately but Canon's do.
Neil.
ps could you post the best you got with the camera.
Thanks for your comments Neil,
Here are some pictures and some further observations. You will see that the pictures are not too bad, and I was in retrospect being overly picky.
The main reason I returned was that I was hoping for a camera that gave me features that addressed shortcomings of my aging Fuji. Ultimately the improvement relative to my existing equipment didn't seem to justify the price tag. I think what I really want is a Canon S95 with full HD video, and maybe such a camera will arrive soon
.
I was also disappointed with the ratio of crap pics to keepers which seemed higher than with my existing equipment. Admittedly I was using the P300 for the first time.
I used my scope primarily at 20x.
All P300 pics are at ISO160. Other than scaling down from 4000x3000 to 640x480, or cropped directly from the full image to 640x480, I have done no postprocessing.
DSCN0054: Speed 1/250,Aperture 3.7, Focal length 11.1mm
DSCN0073: 1/125, 5.5, 17.9mm
DSCN0078: 1/640, 4.9, 17.9mm
DSCN0090: 1/320, 4.0, 12.5mm
Looking at the exif data it seems my impressions of having to be completely zoomed in were false.
Cheers, Ian