QHY163M a 4/3″ mono CMOS camera – part #1

When the QHY’s competitor ZWO released first 4/3″ ASI 1600 mono camera, I was very tempted to get one immediately. I managed to sell my beloved Atik ONE with fabulous Sony IMX694 CCD chip (along with a full set of 3nm Astrodon narrow-band filters) for a decent price and got ready to dive into CMOS future (to get my feet wet). Bearing in mind the fact that since I became a proud father I have unbelievably little time to do any astrophotography I waited with the purchase.

In the end I decided to give QHY a try, because they have been doing DSO (cooled) cameras for very long time (assuming they would have enough experience to make quality products) and had resolved the optical window heating issue that I expected to be a problem for such a „large“ 4/3″ chips.

Summary
My camera showed a defect in too much noise in the image. Also, when the TEC cooler was on there was more noise added than removed. Therefore I had to ship my camera back to China in February 2017 for repair.

End of story #1.

Links
http://qhyccd.com/QHY163.html