SharpCap Forums

I am able to get Sharpcap 3.2 to run my Point Grey grasshopper camera only in mono 8. The camera specs say its a 14 bit mono camera.If I pick raw 16 or mono 16 the display is a pure mess of pure black and white, no grey at all. If I pick 12 bit it freezes.

Is there something I am missing? Do all 14 bit cameras capture in 8 bit?? Is it a display problem, that is it is capturing 16 bit but my monitor won't display it correctly?

Many thanks.

Hi,

Thanks for reporting this issue – I was unaware of it but I can certainly seem to reproduce at least part of it with the blackfly camera that I have to test with. The 12 bit mode also hangs for me. For me the 16 bit mode does give correct greyscales, but I find I often have two close down SharpCap and restart it to get the 16 bit mode to work. I'm sure used to work better than this – but it is quite a long time since I have done any work on the PGR cameras.

Cheers, Robin

Hi,

I found some problems with the 12 bit mode not being handled correctly so I have removed 12 bit modes in the latest version - in theory the 16 bit mode should give the same results. I also made some other changes to the code that supports PGR cameras.

Please have another go with the very latest version in 16 bit and see if it is improved. If not, please send a screenshot and a single frame capture (FITS format) so I can investigate further.

thanks,

Robin

Hi,
unfortunately I have found the same problem now with a different model of GS3. Please note that the image is also flipped vertically in mono8, maybe it can help. I hope the material I have attached can help you finding the problem. It was not possible using full resolution because of limits in attachments' size. Thank you very much.
Bartolomeo

Hi,

thanks for including the image files – looking at those it makes it seem very likely that the problem is that the byte order is being reversed when you are using the high bit depth mode, so that the least significant byte of the pixel values being given the most significant position and vice versa.

I quickly wrote some code to swap the byte order back on the fits file that you uploaded and I get this image when I do that which looks reasonable
I will try to fix the byte order inside the camera handling code for the PGR cameras.

Cheers, Robin

Hi,

this turned out to be a little more interesting than I thought – SharpCap already swaps the byte order when using 16-bit images from PGR cameras. This gives correct images for my Blackfly camera, but obviously is the wrong way round for your camera. I can't see any way to tell automatically from the camera information whether the byte swap is needed, so I am going to add a control for the user to be able to turn it on or off.

This will be in the next update of SharpCap 3.3, which you can find on the beta pages : viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3121

cheers,

Robin

It works great! Everything appears fine now. Thank you very much.
I confirm you that the right setting for GS3-U3-32S4M is OFF for byte swap order.
Bartolomeo

Hi,

Glad to hear that it worked. It's a shame that I can't seem to see any way to set this automatically though

Cheers, Robin