SharpCap Forums

I am not able to get a good focus with my camera, even in the daytime. I tried all of the Camera and Image Controls in SharpCap I could find with no luck. I was able to download and connect my camera to WinJoe which has adjustments for Red, Green, and Blue. However, when I connect my camera to SharpCap, those adjustments do not seem to appear and the histogram shows them signicantly misalligned. I suspect this is why I can not get a good focus. Is there a way to make the necessary camera adjustments in SharpCap?

Background
I do not have the drivers that came with my camera because the CD disc was dammaged so I am using the generic Windows USB Video Device 500 driver. I was unable to send the camera back because it was a gift and time had expired. The shipping label says it is a "Telescope Digital Eyepiece Camera for Astrophotography and Observation with USB Port & Image CMOS Sensor (3.0MP), B01DD13VWE, NS-Z902-IT9I 747380993842 (Sold by Gosky)." I could not find anything about it on the Gosky website. The front of the CD says "Digital Imager, Microscope - Telescope - Spottingscope, Driver, Software, & Manual. After extensive web search, I could not find the camera drivers but found that the software is most likely "WinJoe". WinJoe does allow the image to get sharper but not as much as I would expect. I am not at the end of the focus adjustment because it gets sharper and then less sharp when adjusting the focus in one direction.

Hi,

since you are using your camera via a Windows webcam driver, the controls that SharpCap will show in the right hand panel match those that the camera itself advertises as available. I suspec that the 'Winjoe' software may be adding its own colour balance controls, which SharpCap does not do.

However, it sounds like your real problem is that you are struggling to get good focus. This is not something that is usually resolved by adjusting the colour balance, but sometimes adjustments can be helpful in finding the reason. There are two things I can think of that are worth checking

1) can't get good focus and also colours are wrong, everything has an orange cast - this may be caused by infra-red light and can be fixed by adding an IR blocking filter. Most lens based optics struggle to bring IR and visible light to focus at the same point, so you get the poor focus effect however you adjust the focus and the IR is picked up by the cameras red pixels, giving the orange cast to colours.

2) Chromatic aberration - again a failure for (mostly cheaper) lens based telescopes to bring the different wavelengths of light together at a single sharp focus. You could use the 'red to mono', 'blue to mono', 'green to mono' options in the 'FX' dropdown in SharpCap's toolbar to temporarily select just one colour channel to see if you can get good focus in each channel individually but struggle with all 3 together - that would indicate that chromatic aberration is quite likely your problem.

Hope this helps,

Robin

Thanks for the quick reply! The view never seems to be orange or red, usually green. I will try to see if I get good focus on any of the three channels as you suggested. I suspect that using the generic windows drivers that SharpCap is not getting all of the features available to the camera.