| This album contains video taken mainly with the SONY TRV20E camcorder
and the Televue 40 mm plossl eyepiece through the Swarovski scope. The
Televue eyepiece is the sharpest eyepiece I have and it is sharp right
out to the periphery but it cannot be used well with the 3-CCD TRV900 because
of vignetting. As the TRV20E has a smaller lens, I wanted to test how the
camcorder lens combines with this eyepiece. The results are very encouraging.
There is little or no vignetting once the camcorder lens is zoomed beyond
about 1/4 of its range, giving me a very wide range of magnification to
compose and frame the video. As a result, I could effectively birds that
are closer and bigger.
The setback of this combination are : 1) the eyepiece has poor close
focus and hence for nearer birds, I could not focus if I am using too much
of the camcorder zoom, 2) bad chromatic aberration when shooting a dark
bird against the sky, 3) difficulty in setting appropriate shutter speed/aperture
in low light, 4) problems with white balance at times. However, the vignet-free
video more than compensates for these shortcomings.
I am looking forward to finding out how the new SONY TRV950E 3-CCD camcorder
combines with the Televue eyepiece. It uses three HAD CCD similar to that
of the TRV20 and is of about the same size. The HAD CCD produces
remarkably little video noise even in low light situations. The TRV950
is supposed to have better exposure control, manual mic level, manual white
balance and many other manual features. It looks like this is going to
be an ideal camcorder for digiscoping. It can take stills at a maximum
of 1152X864 pixels using 1Meg pixel from each of the three CCDs. |
