>I own a Spot II and agree the non-real time focusing problem is tough
>for occasional users.  We just demo'ed Optronics new Magnifire
>camera.  This camera is cooled 40 degrees below ambient, has a filter
>wheel in front of the chip that allows RGB images or B&W, has
>firewire transfer relying on an inexpensive generic card that comes
>included, does 10 frames per second so it looks like real time (but
>isn't quite) when focusing or moving the stage x-y controls.  It only
>costs $13,200 list.  I find it far superior to the Spot II.

Could you elaborate a bit? Does your last statement refer to handling
only or to image quality and sensitivity also?

I've only seen the magnafire demoed at a coference and I noticed that
it took about 1.5-2s to switch filters which should have a noticeable
impact on color acquisition speed. What was your impression?

How about read-out noise? Optronics doesn't say anything about it in
the specs and at 17MHz readout rate, it might be considerable. Did
you compare it to the SPOT-2 in that respect?

Also, did you check for registration problems when switching filters?
Where you able to confirm that repeatability for the same filter
position is less than 0.5 pixel?  (Constant shifts from filter to
filter are not a big problem since you can correct for them in
software).

Beat


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