HOW TO USE THE CAMERA

The on-screen menus are accessed and navigated using the supplied hand remote. The menus can also be accessed using the 5 buttons on the back of the camera. To access the on-screen menu press the center button on the remote. The directional up/down/left/right buttons are used to move around the menus and the center menu/ok button is used to enter different menus and select items.

When you press the center button of the remote the main menu will be displayed, at this point press the left and right buttons will switch between the main menus available. To enter one of the main menus press the center button.  When you're in a main menu use the up and down buttons to move between the available options. If an option displays a "⏎" or "↓" symbol, you can press the center button to open a sub-menu with further options.

control

The Revolution Imager camera contains a host of features that are useful for astronomical purposes and a number of features are designed for it's day time or night time use a security camera. On this page we will outline the options that you need to use to start observing straight away! Don't forget to view the object specific pages for recommended settings for viewing deep space objects, planets, and terrestrial objects.

When using the camera you will generally want to changing a few things, they are:

• Exposure Time - the amount of time the camera will spend collecting valuable photons for each frame. Exposure time on the camera is either set to fractions of a second, or multiples of the camera's video framerate which is 1/50th of a second, this table below is a handy reference for exposure times:

  setting	time
  1/100000, 1/10000, 1/4000, 1/2000, 1/1000, 1/500, 1/250, 1/120, 1/60	Fractional second exposures
  AUTO	With this setting the camera picks the exposure time. We recommend using this with the SENSE-UP option.
  x2	0.04 seconds or 1/25
  x4	0.08 seconds or ~1/12
  x8	0.16 seconds or ~1/6
  x16	0.32 seconds or ~1/3
  x32	0.64 seconds or ~1/2
  x64	1.2 seconds
  x128	2.56 seconds
  x256	5.12 seconds
  x512	10.24 seconds
  x1024	20.48 seconds

• Gain - the amount of boost/amplication the camera will apply to the signal. The Revolution Imager uses a system called "Automatic Gain Control" or "AGC" to apply gain to the image. You can set the maximum amount of gain, low, medium, or high and the camera will adjust the gain to produce an image. 
• Sense-Up - A unique feature that allows the camera to auto-pilot with some guidance of the user to find the best exposure and gain for viewing.
• Stacking - the number of frames the camera will combine to reduce noise and bring out detail.
• Brightness and Gamma - these settings affect the overall brightness of the image, brightness is a simple adjustment of brightness whereas gamma effects the brightness of different areas of the image in order to improve brightness and contrast.
• Color - options that deal with how color will be handled: full color or black and white. It is also possible to alter the color balance which can be useful which imaging the Sun.
• Exposure Mode - the camera has different exposure modes, for example Wide Dynamic Range for high contrast objects.
• Dead Pixel Correction - The Revolution Imager uses CCD sensor technology. All CCDs suffer from a small amount of dead pixels. The camera is able to try and detect these dead pixels and attempt to correct them. 

There are two versions of the on-screen menu on the Revolution Imager and the way you alter options are slightly different between the two, look at the table below for a guide on how to find, and how to change the options you are looking for. You can tell which version of menus you have by looking at the apperance of the main menu strip.

When updating any setting, please remember to select "SAVE & EXIT" at the bottom of the menu screen. If you do not select this the camera will reset itself to the previous settings after a short amount of time!