QHY8L or Canon70D?

Canon EOS 70D QHYCCD QHY8L Equipment CCD Buying Advice
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freek fonteyne avatar
freek fonteyne avatar
hello,
I currently use a Canon 70D with my 80mm refractor and have the chance to buy a used QHY8L cooled camera.
This is a 6 MP camera, while the Canon has 20.2 MP. Both sensors are quite big, which is good.

Question is: would the cooling benefit me to such a degree that the smaller amount of pixels of the QHY8L is cancelled out?
dkamen avatar
dkamen avatar
Larger pixels (which is what you get with the lower res since the two cameras have approximately equally sized sensors) means more signal per pixel. Cooling means lower noise. They are not two things that cancel each other, they both go to the same direction of increasing your SNR.

Resolution with the QHY will be about half, but realistically most of us with DSLRs resize at or close to 50% anyway. There is not a doubt the QHY would deliver better images with less fuss all other things being equal.

However, all other things are NOT equal: QHY is OSC CCD astrocam while Canon is OSC CMOS DSLR. It really is apples with oranges, many many dimensions to consider besides megapixels and SNR; extra cable and power source for cooling, reliance on a computer, different workflows, different sensor noise and response curves, different spacing requirements in your optical train….

Hard to tell wether it's worth it.
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