Canon 5D Mark III & 60Da

We are expecting to start shipping the modified 5D Mark III end of this month or early of next month.  It fully depends on the availability from Canon though. I’m very curious how improved it is from 5D Mark II. I’m satisfied with my modified 5D Mark II very much.  I hope I will have the chance to do comparison test some day.

And the next is, yes, it’s 60Da.  This surprised me a lot since I thought 20Da was the compromised camera for astro and regular photography. So why now again? This is my frank question. Indeed, some 20Da users sent Hutech the cameras to modify 20Da for further transmission. After reading Canon pages, looks like the 60Da’s filter response curve seems to be quite similar to 20Da. They say 3x more transmission than the conventional 60D. (Hutech 60DH is close to 5x) If my speculation is right, it still doesn’t fully transmit at Ha wavelength. According to the measured data I have, about 30% is blocked. Another issue, this might be more important though,  is the reflections between the sensor and filter. Following sample images have tremendous halo around bright stars.

CANON 60Da

The measured data is theoretically explaining halo of these images.

In any cases, I’m so glad Canon is still looking at astrophotography as important market. I’m more focusing on mirrorless cameras like Olympus for birding photography these days. But still I believe Canon DSLRs are the best for astro use. In my personal feeling, optical viewfinder is much easier for camera composing for astronomical targets than EVF or LCD screen.

~ by tedishikawa on April 4, 2012.