Continious shutter drive mode on Sony?

qDslrDashboard feature request, ideas
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marz71
Posts: 6
Joined: 14 Apr 2017, 01:26

Continious shutter drive mode on Sony?

Post by marz71 »

Being a Nikon fan I don't undersand how I ended in owing Sony QX1, NEX6, A6300 and now A7S II. I have a love/hate relationship with the cameras and there is quite a lot to hate.
One of the biggest issues is the star eater problem. I just stumbled over interesting article on the issue and a workaround: https://www.lonelyspeck.com/how-to-fix- ... orkaround/

I wanted to prupose an idea I'm about to share with you long time ago, but moved on from QX1 to A6300 and the idea got lost.

QX1 is APS-C body with no screen. It does not have M-mode, but putting manual lens on and using S-mode you get kind of M-mode, because the aperture is stuck to what you set it to on the lens and you can change shutter time. This works nice with dslrdashboard upto shutter time of 3.2sec. After 3.2sec camera does automaticly takes darks to remove hot pixels, and the total exposure time is more than 7sec. It is not possible to turn off and this ruins the workflow in qdslrdashboard. On A6300 you can turn this off, so moving on to A6300 solved my problem.

I belive the A5X00 behaves in similar way, maybe the older NEX cameras too. Both A5X00, QX1 and similar are yesterdays news so I guess there is not much drive to develop special functions for such old cameras, but here is very interesting observation.

If I put the QX1 in continious shutter drive mode, camera does not take second dark exposure even after 3.2sec. It's then very capable to do night timelapse of exposures of about 30 seconds. I belive this will also be true for the other sony cameras in the lower segments.

What is even more interesting that this method seems also to solve the star eater problem with the advanced sony cameras.

And my question is: Is it possible/difficult to add a special sony mode where camera switches to continious drive mode if the exposure is longer than 3 seconds? This would make all sony cameras much more attractive for astrophoto using qdslrdashboard.
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