Telescope Reviews: Panasonic GH3 for near real time AP

Sorry I didn’t see your original request in the other thread. This is how wireless works with my GH3 and Celestron CG-5 mount.

1. The GH3 generates its own wireless network. You can connect to that network from any device with wireless capabilities. However, the only way to control it right now is through either an Android or Apple app.

2. Once you connect to the GH3 you can bring up the app and it will show you exactly what the LCD displays. This isn’t precisely real-time. However, it is essentially real-time. I have held the phone up next to the camera’s LCD and the difference in time for the video is less than the time it takes for you to move your eyes from one device to the other. Probably less than 60 Frames of delay(1 second). It is so much better than the GoPro App. That has some serious lag in the display.

3. I can control almost everything about the camera with the phone. I can control Shutter Speed, Aperture(For m4/3s lenses), ISO, White Balance, Lossless 10x Crop mode for Focusing, RAW vs. JPG, Image Resolution, and Color Mode(Including Sharpness, Contrast, Color, and Noise reduction).

4. The only things I can’t control are that I can’t turn on the fully electronic shutter or the HDR mode directly from the phone. However, I can set it up so that the when I shoot RAW+JPG it does not do HDR and when I switch to JPG only it will automatically switch to the HDR mode. Then I can control that from the phone.

5. I also have the wireless remote($150) for my CG-5 mount. That allows me to completely control my mount from my son’s itouch. It doesn’t work with Android yet. However, I need two separate devices to control it so that doesn’t really matter.

6. With both of those devices I can align objects, correct the exposure, take pictures, and review those images.

For me the biggest benefit is that I only have 2 cables on my entire setup. One Cable goes from my mount to my battery pack and the other cable goes from my scope to the battery pack for my dew fan. Where I live it is so humid that I have to run the fan year round.

There are a few drawbacks to the current wireless setup. I can’t review or see video from the camera on the phone. That is because the camera records at a minimum of 22 mb/sec and that could never be streamed. That isn’t a big deal though. Recording video is not useful for Deep space objects.

Also my live view is limited to no more than 2 seconds of shutter duration while viewing on the phone. Now that doesn’t mean that I can’t record an image with greater than 2 seconds exposure. I can actually go all the way to 60 seconds which is plenty when you can use ISO 6400 or even ISO 12,800 in some situations. It is just that I can go to 8 seconds when I am using the camera’s LCD for live view instead of the phone. They might change this with a firmware or app update though.

Edited by mpgxsvcd (12/20/12 10:08 AM)