What happened to the settings with QHY168C?

[eseavey]

I updated Sharpcap last month and reverted back to the previous version I installed, because I was out in the field imaging and didn't have time to figure things out. The order of the settings for my QHY168C camera changed. I am not seeing the gain slider, the white balance sliders are called red/green/blue gain and now way at the bottom I see digital gain.

I plugged my QHY224C camera in and the settings layout is what is used to be. I am confused. Is the digital gain at the bottom of the settings what used to be gain near the exposure settings?

What happened?

Thanks,
Eric

[admin]

Hi Eric

a while ago I found out from qhy that for certain models of camera the gain is actually controlled by the colour balance sliders and that the main gain control is actually a digital gain option. These cameras have separate gain controls for the R/G/B channels. The 168C is one of the models that falls into this category.

In order to give people the best possible control of their cameras, once I found out about this I adapted the SharpCap code to reflect it properly in the name and locations of the controls. It sounds like you've moved from a version of SharpCap before this change happened to one after the change happened.

Hope this helps explain things, Robin

[Oberon510]

Robin,

I just purchased one of these 168Cs while my ASI071 gets repaired (same sensor). I am getting some strange behavior and looking for advice.

I set the RGB gains to 10, offset to 50 and digital gain is left at 1. When I press live view R gets changed to 17, G to 1 and B to 1 and the exposure time is changed to 2000ms with LX enabled (weird). The problem with it is that it doesn't do 2s exposures but the frame count just keeps going with no image in the view. I have tried a few things but this seems to repeat. The weird thing is that it was working OK last night on your previous SharpCap version (pre 8757) after I adjusted the RGB gains back to my settings - so tonight same change of settings but this time no images in live view.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Ken

[Oberon510]

PS - a quick capture does work OK.

Ken

"Every Ball Went Exactly Where I Wanted It To Go Until The Ball that got me out"
Don Bradman

[admin]

Hi Ken,

when you switch between live and still mode, the camera gets restarted, which means that SharpCap will re-read the settings from the camera. I would expect that to give no change, but if there is an issue with the SDK then maybe sometimes the values come back different, meaning that the exposure or colour balance may jump when changing modes.

From your description, it sounds like you are getting frames from the camera (frame count going up, capture working), but no image. It's possible that some odd camera setting has been saved by SharpCap and is being auto-restored when you re-open the camera. Try holding down the CTRL key while opening the camera - this will stop SharpCap from loading any previously saved camera settings, so should put everything back to default.

cheers,

Robin

[Oberon510]

Thanks - will try the Ctrl select option to see if something is lingering.

Ken