Evaluation:  
Conclusion: Barrel Too Small
Review: Received new camera earlier than scheduled which is always great. Camera barrel was almost one-eight inch too small though which made securing in eyepiece holder difficult. I called Celestron to see what they could do for me. They were very nice and immediately sent me an RMA for a return. Return took about ten days from ship to my door which is normal. Barrel is now exactly 1.25". The camera itself is very cool - just used terrestrially so far but look forward to dark skies. If you have Vista you will need to download the driver from their web site - works fine.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: not a good camera
Review: from the good reviews on here about this product despite the bad reviews I went ahead and purchased this camera. I was disappointed. I was able to get a vista driver off of a forum and the camera operated correctly but the results were less than spectacular. I used this with a orion xt10 telescope and the images that came through were fuzzy and blurry. I took better pictures by just placing my digital camera up to the eyepiece.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Excellent tool, but with a learning curve
Review: I purchased this camera from Amazon and have had a few weeks to test it out. Overall, I've found it to be an excellent tool for lunar and planetary imaging. It is easy to get started using, but to get really good images, you'll need to spend some time and you'll need to be technically adept. A few points are worth noting for newbies. All astro cameras in this price range are essentially webcams that have been modified to capture video through a telescope. This technology achieves image quality by sampling the best frames from the video and then stacking them on top of each other. This results in much more fine detail. This camera comes with two different pieces of software that must be used. The capture software gives a real-time view of the scope video, which allows you to focus, but you must be able to see the laptop screen while you adjust focus on the scope (unless you have a focus motor). The AMCap capture software also allows you to tune the brightness, contrast, frame capture rate and other important video quality metrics. Tuning the capture is a real art and takes practice. The second piece of software is the Registax post processing package. It takes the recorded video, collects and orients the moving image frames and allows you to tune the detail by bringing out features from different frames. The Registax package is relatively technical to use and is a bit intimidating. It takes several attempts to learn how to use it at a basic level, but the instruction PDF provided is very well done. Celestron's support faq site for this camera notes that the camera's internal BIOS can be modified to operate in RAW (uncompressed) avi mode, which will improve its image quality by about 2x. I downloaded the 3rd party utility to do this and also downloaded a better image capture program that allows easier processing of the RAW avi files. After spending several hours learning how CCD video imaging works and upgrading/tweaking, I was getting what I consider to be excellent planetary images with my Celestron NexStar 130 SLT Newtonian. This camera does not allow the use of eyepieces, but can be used with a Barlow. It is equivalent to a fixed 5mm eyepiece. I also bought the optional reducer (see my review of it). Because of the fixed focal character of the CCD chip, this camera is optimized for planetary and lunar imaging (I also did some filtered solar images), but it would be hard to get good deep space images with it, and a reducer is needed for the moon or sun, as they will fill the viewing area several time over. All in all, this is a great tool for the money and lets you produce really nice planetary images for a small price. However, if you're a newbie, you should plan to spend a weekend researching, tweaking and practicing before you get decent results. You can capture quick single frame stills, but they will be disappointing. The stacking and post processing is really needed to get good images.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: Celestron NexImage - affordable - reliable- easy to use
Review: I have found the Celestron NexImage to be a low cost and successful addition to my astrography collection of cameras. The CCD chip is very sensitive and even with my smaller 70mm Meade ETZX you can see Saturn's rings very clearly.
Evaluation:
Conclusion: cannot use the product
Review: I have installed the included software on 2 separate laptop computers without success. A message pops up telling me that a preview is not available, meaning that the image from the camera will not show on the screen. After uninstalling and re-installing the software several times, I searched the internet and found a demo version which I downloaded. This worked fine and showed the image on the screen but the software is not configured the same as the Celestron software and is a limited demo version.
I made several unsuccessful attempts to contact someone at Celestron and they do not respond to my emails.
For me, this was a waste of money!!!!
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