I am about to buy a QSI camera, I know that QSI is a respectable brand but I want to know if these cameras work without issues/limitations with SGP. I’ve never had a QSI camera before so I don’t know how mature is the ASCOM driver.
I know that SGP will work as long as the camera has an ASCOM driver, however the quality of the ASCOM drivers vary from vendor to vendor.
If you are a QSI owner I like to hear your experience!
Not only are they supported but you could go as far as saying that SGP is actually developed on a QSI as that’s what Ken shoots with.
I can’t recall why we implemented QSI natively. I’m guessing their ASCOM driver wasn’t available when we implemented support or maybe it wasn’t stable? I can’t recall to be honest. If you’d rather use the ASCOM driver you can still use it, just install it and choose it rather than the native driver.
QSI does not have an official ASCOM driver. They actually took the ASCOM spec, decided they needed more control, and then extended that model for their own use. This is why is still appears as a registered ASCOM device. Technically speaking, it does not share any of the same code as our ASCOM cameras.
I’ve had a look at the QSI documentation. I’m not sure why they chose not to fully support ASCOM when it’s so close. Quite a lot of the features they say aren’t available were added in the Camera V2 specification and many of the others could be handled in the setup dialog.
Incorporating the built in filter wheel in the camera driver means that it’s only available from the same application as the camera isn’t it? ASCOM’s LocalServer model is designed to handle the situation where more than one device uses the same hardware connection and allow different applications to handle them independently.