OCAL 3.0 improvements over OCAL 2.0

Hi,

A question for those who already purchased and tested the 3.0 version of OCAL - do you confirm that the overall image resolution/quality and contrast is better than the previous version OCAL 2.0 (as they claim)?

I haven't find any reviews anywhere of the newer version. I only saw their video on their Youtube channel with the comparison between the two versions. I would like to have some opinions before I buy it. If you could post some printscreens of it (the 3.0 version) while performing collimation, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks
CS

Image quality is excellent but I can't compare to version 2.0 as I only have 3.0.  There's a contrast slider that can be adjusted.  My problem is the 3 circles don't line up with my Edge HD 8 scope.  I'm trying to figure out which circles are the most critical when I have the crosshairs exactly in the center.  Since the Edge only has the adjustments for the secondary mirror, it's going to be a challenge.

Thank you Jerry and Scott for your help.

Scott - looking forward to check those screenshots, thank you so much!

I'm going out tonight to test 3.0 with the Edge HD 8".  I collimated it in my office this afternoon and was informed by someone with the same colliimator and the Edge 9.25 that the inner most circles are most important. Here's what I came up with today, tonight will be the star test to see if it's even close...

I found that the collimation was close, but not close enough.  So I tried collimating outside in the dark at 1422mm focal length.  After trying for an hour I gave up.  It's not that collimating to a star is hard, it's that the star is moving so quickly out of the FOV at that focal length that I kept having to get it back in the center and in the meantime I made the collimation worse.

There's got to be a way to use the OCAL to get highly accurate collimation, I'm going to keep trying.   Some people say that it's not designed for SCT's because there is only one mirror (the secondary) that can be collimated.  If that's true, I may end up with a reflector that, paradoxically, is harder to collimate because there are two mirrors to collimate, but the OCAL might be better suited to that. 

Tomorrow I'll try to collimate only using the outer green circle and the cross-hairs and see if that gets me any closer. 

If anyone gets their Edge into highly accurate collimation with the OCAL please let me know how you did it.

OK!  I ended up collimating last week and came up with this:



That evening I went out and did a star test and the out-of-focused star had a doughnut hole dead-center, no more collimation was necessary.   The star's imperfections are not due to collimation error, but guiding issues.  The seeing wasn't great and there was wind.  But all in all, I am definitely happy with the OCAL 3.0 collimator and best of all I can do it indoors without needing an artificial star..  Here's the image I got with the Edge HD 8":