Starlight Xpress SXV-M7C - Manual (Page 7)

Handbook for SXV-M7C Issue 1 June 2004
7
and the camera control panel will appear (see above). Select an exposure time of 0.1
seconds and press ‘Take photo’. After the exposure and download have completed
(between 1 and 3 seconds) an image of some kind will appear on the computer
monitor. It will probably be poorly focused and incorrectly exposed, but any sort of
image is better than none! In the case of the pinhole, all that you can experiment with
is the exposure time, but a camera lens can be adjusted for good focus and so you
might want to try this to judge the image quality that it is possible to achieve.
One potential problem with taking daylight images is the strong infrared response of
the SXV-M7C. Although the colour filters give good selection of the visible
wavelengths, they pass a significant amount of infrared light that can change the
colour rendering. This will dilute the colours of green plants (chlorophyll reflects
strongly in the IR), and will cause ‘soft focus’ with camera lenses. You can take good
images of many artificially coloured objects, but grass and trees will look ‘washed
out’. Soft focus with camera lenses is much reduced by keeping the aperture setting
below F8. IR blocking filters are available from various suppliers (True Technology,
Edmunds etc.) and are recommended for best results.
If you cannot record any kind of image, please check the following points:
1) Is the power LED on?
2) Does the software indicate that the camera is successfully connected? An attempt
to take a picture will fail with an error message if the USB is not properly installed. In
this case, try unplugging the USB cable and then reconnecting it after about 5
seconds. Restart the camera software and see if it can link now. If not, check in
Windows device manager (via ‘System’ in ‘Control Panel’) and see if the BlockIO
device is installed properly.
3) If you cannot find any way of making the camera work, please try using it with
another computer. This will confirm that the camera is OK, or otherwise, and you can
then decide how to proceed. Also check on our web site to see if there are any updates
or information about your camera software that might help. The message board might
prove useful to ask for help with getting your camera operating properly.
Our guarantee ensures that any electrical faults are corrected quickly and at no cost
to the customer.
Decoding the image to colour:
Once you have a reasonably clear and well-exposed image, you might like to try
generating a colour picture from it. The procedure is quite simple and may be carried
out as follows:
1) Check the ‘Set program defaults’ menu and ensure that the ‘Pixel’ and ‘Line’
offsets are both unselected.
2) Click on ‘Colour’ in the main menu and then select ‘Synthesise Colour Image’.
3) Select ‘Apply Anti-Alias’, but leave the other options switched off.
4) Click on ‘Create Image’.