The SXVR-H16

[perfrej]

Dave,

I am not surprised, actually. Quality today is numbers and how you handle your flow of sampling and rejection, not to mention how you handle your paperwork around all this (ISO9000 anyone?). It simply does not cover the fact that a product can have good or bad build or design quality.

William Optics gave me the waltz as well. They sent me a Megrez 90 that was going to be my entry into the refractor world. Pinched optics. They never admitted that the optics had anything wrong with them, but, at a later time in the process, attributed it to a faulty optical tube. Right... They were very forthcoming and "adjusted" the optics when I sent the lens assembly back to them Same thing; pinched. In the end we agreed on moving up to the FLT98, which a got a good discount on, and I am happy with that scope - were it not for the DDG focuser. Feathertouch on its way from Ian King...

Ever tried a laser collimation device? Needs collimation, most likely. I found that mine was not straight so I drove by the dealer. Out of a box of ten of them I tried every single one and found one - one - that had less than 10mm of circle at 2m distance. The rest were off by miles and produced up to 100mm circles. How collimated does your Newton turn up to be when the collimation of the collimator is off? Oh, the setting screws on the collimator? Hidden under two pieces of silicon-based rubber-like goo and under the label (with goo as well, of course)... Took a good while to get at them. And the thing was not even screwed together properly.

As for electronics, well, it's all Spice these days. Few engineers can handle a soldering iron or build a "wild bush" style test rig to see if the stuff works. On the other hand, much of the digital stuff is at such high frequencies that you have to take board design into consideration if the design is going to work at all. Then comes the mix of RF and straight digital. The digital designers don't know any RF so the harmony between the two is gone. It was better in the old days, kind of...

Support? Nobody knows anything. SImple as that. When you do find someone from the supplier that can actually help you it is not a support person.

Rant, rant, gripe, gripe...

You will get the camera straight or return it. You will have a Feathertouch on your FLT110, and the next product you buy will most likely have issues that you have to take care of simply because you understand the problem - most people do not.

Okay, it's 06.39 on a Sunday morning. What am I doing here?

/per

[Carole]

Hmm, I don't think I would have accepted a new camera whatever it cost if it did not work properly, let alone what you paid for it Dave.

Hope you get it sorted.

Carole

[antimorris]

Goodness this really is like a bad bedtime story that just never ends! Sorry you are having such a bad string of luck with your gear, hopefully it will all be sorted soon and that will be the end of the bad astro parts!

[GrahamM]

Well put Per, spot on I and couldn't have ranted better myself.

Carole, I can understand where you're coming from but as Per says and has been said elsewhere; Astro kit very seldom works as it should do straight from the box..... drivers, firmware updates the list is endless. On the subject of Optics assembled in the far East the differential cooling between glass and the cells is more likely to cause pinched optics than scopes assembled in cooler climes.
The big problem is our Astro kit interfaces with other Items and it's not like buying a self contained item that either works or doesn't so I can't see this situation improving any time soon. You are correct and perhaps if we all sent these poorly finished items back things might improve.

My rant would be with Orion Optics, simply the worst company I've ever had to do business with by a wide wide margin, ... I'm not going there ....it's Sunday and I'm not going to spoil it.

Graham.

[DaveS]

A good summary of the 'status quo' Per

In a sense the consumer and western demand for goods at lower cost, is partly to blame. We want quality but don't want to pay too much for it, and cheap and quality don't mix.

Manufacturing in the UK just could not compete on cost with goods made in the far East, and as a result most of our manufacturing industry has gone. Our Steel Industry, and our Ship Building to name but two.

However, like many people I am prepared to pay a sensible figure for quality, and believe that in many cases, the price I am paying deserves a quality product. Albeit, I don't seem to be getting this from astro-equipment manufacturers.

The optics in all three of my Meade LX200 series scopes, were made in the U.S., and were very good. However, the Meade Series 5000 refractor that I bought, was made in China, and the optics were not good at all.

I now have the WO FLT 110, and IMO, the optics are excellent, but then the focuser is not fit for purpose. All made of course in Taiwan.

With the Skywatcher MN190, some people were lucky and got a good one, others were not so lucky.

It really is all about the lack of quality control throughout the manufacture and assembly process.

What has really surprised me is that SX chose 'style' for the 'R' series cameras against good engineering design. Its not difficult science to understand that Peltier devices generat heat, that this heat needs to be diposed of, and that a small heat-sink surface area won't do this very effectively.

I also find it difficult to believe, that an astro imaging camera wasn't designed to work with the confines of an observatory, but only outside. If you want to use it in an observatory, it needs an 'add on' cooler.

I know they have to compete with Atik, who must be their main competitor, and as the H16 and the Atik 4000 use the same Kodak 'chip', the circuitry of both cameras must be very similar. So, the only way they can make the cameras look different, is in the design of the casing. Atik's is much larger than the SX, and flashy orange coloured, with water cooling pipes. The SX is much smaller a neater looking.

I'm sure that as a very experienced electronics designer, Terry Platt would have been very well aware of the potential for cooling problems with the compact case design, but maybe he was was over ruled by marketing side of the company. This is not uncommon in industry.

You are absolutely correct Per, with regard to digital designers not understanding RF. As Conultant EMC Engineer (now a professional layabout ) I had the task of teaching digital designers to think RF. They had little understanding that their nice square wave digital signals, with nice sharp corners, were rich in harmonics, extending way up into the radio frequency spectrum.

A pbc track could act an antenna, radiating electromagnetic interference.

A narrow ground track my be fine at DC, and at RF its not a ground at all, and that one layer of the PCB must be a solid ground-plane offering a low impedance RF 'ground'. The wrong choice of capacitor type, could result in them appearing as inductors at RF. The story goes on and on!!

Goodness, this is like being back at work .

As far as the Widescreen Centre goes, they have sold me an early last years model, with a late 2011 registration plate on it.

I just hope the end of this saga, and a satisfactory conclusion is now in sight.

Dave

[perfrej]

Dave,

Time to order a Feathertouch kit for your FLT

/per

[Dennis]

It's interesting to see ISO 9000 finally raise its head! This used to be my bible when specialising in QA for BT procurement, mainly for sub-sea optical fibre cable systems. As someone that rode the manufacturer's back 24/7 I know what quality costs. I also know that you can get it in astro gear but you have to be prepared to pay the price. I bought a 35mm chipped camera a couple of years ago and decided on a 'cheap' one at about £2500 because I was a bit charry about buying an STL 11000. In the end I sold the camera that I bought because it was cheap (and the external filter wheel that it needed - another horror story from time to time) and forked out the extra for the SBIG. Not once have I regretted it. As someone that spent years inspecting electronics products for telecomms I happen to know quality when I see it. ISO 9000 is the generic spec, ISO 9001 deals with quality of design and on cutting edge submarine cable systems it taxed the designers, the prototype manufacturing staff and me to a considerable extent. The cost of QA on things like this runs into millions but the product works first time and is expected to last twenty years under the sea.

Small time makers of astro gear cannot hope to compete unless they charge high prices, you get what you pay for. When did you hear of a Tak with pinched optics? If we all send back the dodgy gear (world wide) then the makers will get the message but the price will go up. How much are you really prepared to pay for quality and what is the accepted definition of quality in these cases. Reliability must come into it and yet we all put up with forced cooling. Not the most reliable solution out there.

Reading Dave's sorry saga it seems to me he has been short changed by the dealer. I can't do quotes but Dave said 'As far as the Widescreen Centre goes, they have sold me an early last years model, with a late 2011 registration plate on it'. Would you accept that from a car dealer where the age of the product being offered for sale is more obvious? Maybe the camera should have been returned to them under the Sale of Goods Act as not being of merchantable quality. Old software/firmware blah, blah. Are they going to get away scot free?

Dennis

'

[andrew s]

While I tend to agree with Dennis about getting what you pay for that does not mean to say expensive gear is trouble free.

I had a Parallax mount with AstroPhysics dive system. It would runaway (very scary) and only after I managed to video it going wrong as I raised the DC voltage to the recommended 18V did I get a replacement drive box.

I also found a bug in the AP firmware for those of us living in the zero time zone. It took me a long time to convince the software developer it was his mistake and not some set-up problem on my behalf. When I got an AP900 some years later the fix was still not in the recommended firmware version but you could use a trail version in which it was!

After a fire destroyed my observatory I got a Paramount and it blew 2 power cards before they came out with a new version. They paid for one I had to pay for the other.

I have a FLI MaxCam which started to frost on cooling as it was out of guarantee I had to pay for the repair and the cost of to sending it back to the US.

I think a major issue is the small volumes involved, lack of real quality assurance and especially software/firmware testing. In addition we praise manufactures who bend over backwards to help when we have problems (which is good) but tend to forget that we should not have had them in the first place!

Andrew

[perfrej]

I think this thread is going to end with a collective "Amen"!

[DaveS]

Amost there now, I think

The new front mounting plate and sealing ring arrived this morning, and the good news is that light is no longer leaking into the camera.

Also, the new mounting plate screws onto the Filter Wheel, well almost that is

In the mounting plate there are three countersunk holes. These allow three mushroom head fixing screws (for attaching the plate to the camera) to 'sit' below the front surface of the mounting plate, thus allowing the camera to fit flush to the filter wheel's mounting plate.

However, the countersunk holes in the new camera front plate are a smaller diameter that those in the old plate, and as such the mushroom screws heads now 'sit' proud of the front plate. In doing so, they foul on the scews of the filter wheel's mounting plate, and so the camera cannot be fully screwed onto the filter wheel.

I have e-mailed Terry, advising him accordingly.

BTW, yesterday I e-mailed Simon Bennet at the Widescreen Centre, as yet (15.45 today) I have not received a reply.

To be continued:

Dave

[GrahamM]

I think Gordon Bennet is more appropriate .... Graham.

[jcm]

Hi all,

Not been on the site for ages.( was called back from early retirement and ended up working full time for over a year )
Been looking to upgrade my Atik 16HR to the SXVR-H16. This SXVR is now a bit cheaper than the Atik 4000.( Euro exchange rate?)
Its been a shock to read the problems Dave has had with the H16. I bought a Starlight Xpress SXV-M7 several years ago at a very cheap price because it had been on a dealers shelf for a while - worked perfectly. Its image downloads are so quick I now use it now as a guide camera.

This thread has made me rethink my next purchase but on paper the H16 just appears the best buy.

John

[DaveS]

Hi John, nice to see you back.

There is no doubt that the SXVR-H16 is capable of producing some very nice images, and the FOV compared with my H9 is excellent.

Don't be put off by my experience, as my mistake was to buy one from a shop where the camera had been sitting on the shelf for 18 months, and possibly much longer.

If you decide to buy one, then go to someone like Ian King or Steve (FLO), and get them to order one in, and you can then be sure that it will be fully up to spec, and as I am now lead to understand, it will come with the 'cooling enhancer' as standard.

All my problems stem from the fact that my camera was produced very early on in the SXVR-H16 production cycle, and then just sat at the Widescreen Centre, waiting for a mug like me to along and buy it, getting on for 2 years later .

With the current front plate now in-place, and the sealing ring, all of which are now standard on current cameras, plus of course the latest firmware, the camera appears to working fine.

IMO the addition of the 'cooling enhancer' is not an option, but essential, and I think you will find that they are now supplied as standard, and not as a £40 optional extra

At the moment, the camera is out in the obsy, taking a sequence of 15 min dark frames at -15 degrees. I took a sequence of 10min ones earlier on.

The next step, when the sky clears, will be to take some images. Then I'll be in position to better assess the camera.

Dave

[DaveS]

I think that I'm now about as weary of this whole affair, as I can get.

Mechanical problems resolved, firmware prolem resolved, light leak resolved, and cooling problem resolved.

Now its software

Since introducing the H16 into the equation, the Lodestar is no longer recognised by AA5 or Maxim. They both now think that the SXVF-H9 is a SXVR-H9, and that the Lodestar is a SXVR-H16. This now means that when the H16 and the Lodestar are connected, the software thinks that there a two H16s connected.

Downloaded a fresh copy of the 64bit htm software from the SX web-site, but no change.

Spent 3 hours trying to resolve this tonight

Am now getting very close giving up on the whole damn H16 business. I'm a fairly patient man, but my goodness this saga has pushed me to the limit!!

Dave

[Harry Page]

Hi Dave

I am afraid you had the loadstar connected to the computer when you uploaded the firmware to the H16 , so the loadstar has the H16 firmware in it and has a identity crisis.

Easy fix though , just get terry to send you the loadstar firmware and reload it to the loadstar after unplugging your H16 or it will think its a loadstar

Of course I never did this myself

Harry