Canon notice who the 300D customers are

www.dpreview.com/news/0502/05021405canoneos20da.asp

Canon Japan has this morning sprung a surprise on everyone with the announcement (in Japan only so far) of the EOS 20Da. This specialized version of the EOS 20D appears to be identical except for the removal of the 'hot mirror', the filter in most digital camera's which removes the InfraRed part of the spectrum. This camera would be especially suited to astrophotography as well as InfraRed photography, in use as a 'normal camera' it would probably require an external IR cut filter on the lens. In addition the camera has a partially transmissive mirror which enables live focusing on the LCD monitor.


world.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_page...ex.html&lp=ja_en
[babelfish of the Japanese canon site]

Cheers,
~Al

A dedicated DSLR camera for astronomy !
I had a quick look, I couldn't see anything about price.
Seems like canon just could not ignore the high ownership of DSLR cameras by astronomers.

Just read about this too and was about to post here...

All this talk of moding a 300D and now with Canon making a camera aimed at that market got me thinking... there must be a fair few people with older digital cameras that are outdated by todays standards, maybe 2 or 3 or 4 megapixel jobs that could be given the 300D treatment - ie open the thing up and remove the IR blocking filter from the CCD or CMOS. It wouldn't be such a disaster to ruin an old cam worth under a 100 euro.

mmmmm :idea:

All this talk of moding a 300D and now with Canon making a camera aimed at that market got me thinking... there must be a fair few people with older digital cameras that are outdated by todays standards, maybe 2 or 3 or 4 megapixel jobs that could be given the 300D treatment - ie open the thing up and remove the IR blocking filter from the CCD or CMOS. It wouldn't be such a disaster to ruin an old cam worth under a 100 euro.

A problem with older digital cameras is that when the shutter speed is above say 4 or 8 seconds then hot-pixels and other noise creeps in to the photo.

The 300D allows 30+ seconds without this happening (I think? - any 300d owners out there, what's the max time before hotpixels or noise becomes a problem?)

I've taken pics over 2 minutes long without seeing any problems.

With an older camera you may not have a bulb setting for super long exposures but the more decent ones have up to 15 or more seconds. Hot pixels are easily dealt with by taking a dark frame and some cameras handle this for you automatically.

I have a Canon G2 and a 20D. The older G2 is a good camera with 4MP and 15 second exposures at ISO50 F2. I'm think of moding the G2 for daytime IR photography alone (I don't have a motorised mount for tracking, so it's not really worth my time for astrophotography).