You're welcome, Birdingam :t:
I find it somewhat amusing (or not) when I read a reply where the respondent has no experience of the camera in question.
I had hoped that the White-tailed Sea-eagle image would have shown that it is a reasonably capable piece of equipment. Apparently not. Oh well.
It is true that superzooms cannot be used for digiscoping when zoomed up to the tele range. However, that is still not how digiscoping works. If a very fine scope is used, it will certainly have a better image quality than the zoom lens of a P&S camera, and certainly better than the small sensor can make use of.
Thus, it is advisable to use wide angle eyepieces with high magnification for "normal" digiscoping distances. Wide angle in order to minimise vignetting, although some cropping certainly must be done. The original image in post#4 is not cropped at all.
The zoom lens of the camera will perform optically better and have a larger aperture in the wideangle range, compared to the tele end.
With the combination I use, I get the best results (least vignetting) when slightly zoomed in. If the zoom setting corresponds to a 32 mm lens and 50 mm is considered 1:1, the focal length with a 50x eyepiece will correspond to (32/50)*50*50 = 1600 mm.
Cropping the image by 75% (the image diagonal is halved) will correspond to 3200 mm.
The fine thing with the TZ40, apart from being small and feature-packed, is that it is reasonably useful for some bird photography even when not digiscoping.
With 18M resolution, its longest focal length corresponds to 480 mm. With a 30x digiscoping eyepiece, it's (32/50)* 30*50 = 960 mm, maybe 1200 mm when the necessary cropping is done.
So, it bridges the magnification gap that would occur if it had only had 4x optical zoom, while still being useful for digiscoping.
It may not be the most perfect digiscoping camera, but I'm very satisfied with it.
Re Neil's suggestions, I'm sure that they are very capable cameras and I have no reason to dismiss them, in particular since I have no experience with any of them.
//L