I have just spent a couple of hours with the Contax SL300T*, and to say I'm impressed with it's digiscoping abilities is an understatement.
This camera is absolutely tiny compared to the Nikons at 100mm wide, 62.5mm heigh and a depth of an amazing 2mm. Weight is 125g, so around 1/3 of the weight of a cp995/4500
It many ways it's like a tiny cp990/995/4500 with a similar design of a rotatable lens section (or rotatable monitor section, whatever way you want to look at it) and the lens is of an internal focusing design like the Nikons. The lens on the Contax is 3x (5.8-17.4mm or 38-115mm in 35mm speak). The ccd is a 3.34mp design, so the same as the cp990/995.
The good news for digiscopers is that the camera comes with a 28mm thread, courtesy of a tiny clip-on adapter... so a typical digiscoping adapter fits straight on. Although the adapter is plastic, it hardly needs to be metal as it's only supporting a 125g camera.
O.K. so what is special about this camera (other than it's size and that it's in production right now, unlike the Nikon cp4500).... 3.5fps until your card is full, Shutter lag that's .07sec and start-up time of less than a second!!!
Forgetting the above specs.... after an hour or two it's sunk in to me that this camera takes good digiscoped photos far more consistantly than my previous cameras have. Every shot has been sharp and I have absolutely no trouble judging focus on it's monitor (1.5 inch and extremely clear). Oddly enough, depth of focus seems greater on this camera than other... possibly a smaller ccd than usual? maybe smaller lens than usual? Whatever the reason, this means focusing doesn't need to be quite as critical for a sharp subject.
There isn't too much in the way of manual controls... but aperture priority is there, so no problem.
Minor quibbles are inevitable, cameras are made for a mass market and not digiscopers! No tripod socket on underside, so cable-release cannot be connected (although my photos have been surprisingly sharp with just a finger on the shutter button today). Internal battery (it is small!!) doesn't power the camera for long, though Contax can supply extra batteries. SD cards need to be used (and fast ones for 3.5fps)
No bird photos today, but I'll get some from this camera in the next day or two.
