 Hey there, Nico Carver here. I get a fair amount of questions about shopping for astronomy cameras and which specs are actually important. And so I thought that a tier list where I'd rank the specs is a fun way to discuss this, which to be honest is a fairly dry and technical topic, and I'll rank how important the different specs are to me, but keep in mind that I'm a deep glass photographer who mostly takes photos of Nebulae as the name of this channel suggests. So the considerations would be very different if we're talking about planetary or lunar or even high resolution astrophotography. Different things sort of change the calculus. Anyways, here we go. So a CMOS versus a CCD sensor, I'm going to rank this E. This is sort of like the Sony versus Canon war in regular cameras for me where people take sides just based on what they own and then they don't really listen or they just think they know what's best. And for most use cases, it really doesn't matter to the actual results, whether your camera has a CMOS sensor, a complementary metal oxide semiconductor sensor, or a CCD, which is a charge coupled device sensor. Now, with that said, the reason I'm giving this an E and not an F is there is one thing that does matter and that's binning pixels together. And what binning is is it's where you instruct the camera to treat an array of pixels like a two by two or four by four array as one super pixel. And we can software bin by just resampling an image, but hardware binning is something that's only possible with CCDs and not CMOS. So if binning is a deal breaker for you, and this is really an advanced thing, that's something just like someone new to extra cameras should worry about, then the CCD versus CMOS thing actually matters. Next one is sensor size. And I'm going to put this A tier. And while you can get great images with smaller sensors, it's it's limiting, right, because you can never get back that area of the sky that you're missing out on with bigger objects and things like that, unless you have a bigger sensor or you mosaic. But even with mosaics, I found that having the bigger sensor really makes a huge difference. Like I was using a micro four thirds ASI 1600, I recently moved to an APS-C QHY 268M. And this big mosaic project I was working on went from 66 panels to 35 panels with no drawback because the pixel size is the same between the two. So I'm covering more area of the sky in less time. And that's always a plus for me as someone who loves mosaics, big emission nebulae, but doesn't have a lot of dark sky time because of the weather and other factors. Okay, next one here is resolution. And I'm just going to actually delete this icon and not rank it because it's already covered by sensor size and pixel size, which we'll talk about in a minute. And so we don't need to cover that one. Okay, the analog digital converter bit depth. I'm going to rank this one D. No, well, I'll do C. It's really a weird spec to list because it's not the dynamic range of the sensor. It's the dynamic range of the sensor is determined by the full well depth and the read noise. So it's, it's usually not a limitation like it with my ASI 1600 has a 12 bit ADC, but the I'm always working with limited dynamic range anyways. So who cares that it doesn't have a 16 bit ADC. So very misunderstood spec, which is why I'm putting it C. Next one here is read noise. This is S tier for me. And the reason it is partly is because the consensus of many astrophotographers that are smarter than me and that I trust completely say this is a very important spec, but I've also read a lot about it. And I think it makes sense. You want read noise to be low, obviously, this gives the camera much more flexibility to take short exposures. Because if you have very high read noise, you ideally need to take much longer exposures so that you can effectively swamp the read noise. And for me, I like the shorter exposures. I love taking 5 to 10 minute narrow band and two minute broadband. I'm at f 5.4 by the way. Because then you when you're taking the shorter exposures, you don't have to feel so guilty about throwing out data that is subpar. Well, if I was taking 30 minute or 60 minute sub exposures, I'd feel much more possessive about each one about each sub exposure. So I'm all in on low read noise. I think it's a superior spec. It gives you a lot more flexibility in imaging. Okay, cooling performance. I'm also going to put this S tier. Not so much the performance, but just that it has a set point cooler, because you can often buy these astronomy cameras with or without a cooler. And I would always recommend if you're going to buy one for deep sky, get the one with a set point cooler, because it makes it so that you only have to take darks like once a year, or maybe every two years, you just build a dark library, don't have to take darks the night of. I have the darks for different setting camera settings like one for broadband, one for narrow band, and it's just so easy and reliable to have a set point cooler in the camera. Okay, this icon is their symbol for an image buffer. I'll rank this one C. I don't really know, or maybe I'll do a D. I don't I don't know. It might be important, but like my size 1600, I had an early model, it didn't have an image buffer, and I never had any problems with image transfer using sequence generator pro. But I'm sure there's probably a reason why they put image buffers, but it seems like they all have it nowadays anyways, so it's not like a huge plus. Full well capacity, I'm going to put this one at a B tier. It's combined with read noise, this is a measure, you can actually measure the sensor's actual dynamic range. And dynamic range and having a big full well is particularly important if you are going to image it gain zero with broadband filters and things like that. So it sort of depends on your imaging style, but I think full well capacity is an important metric. This is our first F. This is USB speed. For deep sky imaging doesn't matter. You could do USB two, three, it really doesn't matter. It's only a concern for lucky imaging, which is mostly planetary and lunar and solar stuff. Okay, pixel size, I'm going to put this one at B tier. It is an important spec. The pixel size and the focal length together, the focal length of your telescope, tell you your image scale, which means how finely you're sampling the stars in the night sky, which theoretically determines the smallest details that you can resolve. And so knowing about this spec is important, but I don't think it's as important as read noise or sensor size or having cooling. I'll do another video on image scale and pixel pitch because I think that people usually oversimplify it, which I don't want to do here, but there's a lot of considerations like seeing, DAW's limit, other practical limits to how much we can hope to actually resolve with smaller and smaller pixels or longer and longer focal length. So I don't have time to go into all that now, but some other five minute Friday, I promise I'll do it. Okay, quantum efficiency, this is, I'm going to put B tier, and this is how effectively your camera is turning photons into electrons, which is then what it counts to make an image. So it's a very important spec for astrophotography because we're dealing with not many photons, every photon counts, as Steve Richard says. So it is important, but be careful with the graphs to your own homework, because what we are really interested in is the absolute quantum efficiency of a camera. So we could compare it to different cameras at different wavelengths. But what you often get is just a relative quantum efficiency graph, which is that that's only measuring how well the camera does against itself at different wavelengths. And that's not very interesting, because almost all the CMOS cameras seem to peak on the green and so what. So we want the absolute QE. Okay, last one here, frames per second, I'm going to put this at F tier with USB speed, it's sort of related. You want a high frame rate and a fast USB speed, if you're doing planetary lunar solder, where you're shooting video or and doing lucky imaging technique for deep sky, unless you were doing lucky imaging deep sky, which I know is getting more popular, but it's not something I do. So I'm putting it F tier. Okay, that was a lot of information fast. So if there's anything here that you want me to go deeper on, let me know in the comments. But this was sort of fun, just to go through them quickly and rank them and fill out this tier list. So till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Nebula Photos.com. Clear skies.