meade ccd ?

Looking at the meade 416xte for autoguiding and imaging for my lx50 10" F10 scope. Any problems I should know about before I move on . this is gonna be my first ccd.
thanks for any input, all appreciated
Brian

Hi Brian,

I've used meade's 416 and 1616, sbig's st7 and st9, and an apogee ap7 and ap8. I'd advise against the meade; I know the sbig is quite a bit more $$ for a camera built around the same chip, but it really is worth it. It's not so much for the built-in guider (which is nice, but not always useful), but the overall build quality of the sbig -- the mechanics, the electronics, and the software -- is vastly better than the pictor series cameras.

I'm not a general meade-basher. I own and like a lot of their stuff. But I really don't like their ccds. For one thing, the pictor software is truly awful; if you do wind up getting the meade camera, at least look into getting a 3rd party software package (MaxIm DL is fantastic). Meade cameras require an absurd amount of backfocus (with the Meade filter wheel). The cooler doesn't work very well. The SCSI download is buggy, and the serial download is slow. The included autoguider is a pain to use.

I know the pictor is a lot cheaper for the same imaging chip, and I know that a lot of people have gotten good results with meade cameras, but they really are 2-3 steps below sbig in quality. There are other options out there in the same price territory as meade's cameras (starlight xpress, the mythical apogee lisaa...) that you might check out (I haven't tried those), or if you can possibly afford the higher price, go for the sbig.

Hope you enjoy whatever you get.

PB