SharpCap Forums

Hi, I'm taking some planetary images of Jupiter with a ToupTek G3M678C on a C9.25, and I'm getting some bad frames in the SER recordings.
In particular, during yesterday's session, I was using RAW8 with a ROI of 640x640, 4 ms at gain 400, achieving about 100 FPS on my Mele Quieter 4C (N150, 32GB RAM, 512GB fast storage). This problem also appeared in another session using RAW16. SharpCap Pro version 4.1.13970.0 - 12/1/2025.

Basically, I see random frames with a horizontal bar and partially overexposed in the raw footage. I notice around 10 of those frames over a 90-second video, appearing at random places (non-consecutive). I'm wondering how to solve this issue and whether it's related to the camera or SharpCap. Thank you.

Hi,

I think this is probably a glitch coming from the camera itself rather than anything introduced on the software side. There's not really anything in SharpCap that could do this kind of thing to one frame in several hundred and leave the others fine - particularly if you are not using any of the 'preprocessing' options on the right (those do modify frame data, but usually in a consistent way).

I think the first thing to do would be to try different - lower - values for the USB Speed setting. Although that may reduce the overall maximum frame rate somewhat it does tend to improve stability in general and can help get rid of issues like this. If you can shorted/simplify the USB connection back to the PC that might also help (remove hubs/extensions - have a single cable of the minimum workable length from the camera straight back to the PC).

If you can find a slightly lower value that gets rid of the problem without too much loss of frame rate then you are fine. Otherwise, it would be worth updating the toupcam.dll file to the latest version (if/when the next version is released by ToupTek - SharpCap currently has the latest available as far as I am aware).

cheers,

Robin