Equipment review : Mounts

iOptron SmartEQ

I purchased this mount for photography usng a TS 60 f5.5 with Flatfield Reducer and focal length of 260mm in combination with a Nikon D7000 – total weight about 4 kg

Likes :
Generally everything seemed of good quality for a "cheap" mount
Setting it up was relatively easy
The polarscope worked well
The hand controller was intuitive and simple to use.
After a 1 Star align, I found all objects, very impressive ( my Gemini G53F can't do this – although the focal length is 5 times longer )

Dislikes :
The tripod was just a little to weak, not very stable.
There was little adjustment in Azimuth, also the Alt adjustment was not so easy when moving down, one had to push down on mount and it went all out of wack ). Additionaly, the Alt adjustment was very close to the Polarscope cap
According to the manual, no counter weight was needed upto 2kg. With my setup, I definetly needed one, but the supplied 0,9kg weight was too much, even when fixed in the highest position. Finding weights with a 12mm hole is not easy !
It turned out to be almost impossible to align the mount using only the camera ( not a mount issue ). I tried first using an ocular but had to completely alter the setup. On changing back to the camera, the mount tended to get knocked out of alignment, as it was all so flimsy. To overcome this, I rigged up a small finderscope on the APO and aligned using this with camera fixed in place, this did the trick, but added more weight
Now, down to the main problem, tracking – basically at 260mm one had a drift of about 5 pixels in 60s, this provided photos that were ok for the web, but couldn't be shown to astrophotographers. At 120s the photos were definitely scrap. I had done my initial trials with Eneloop rechargeable batteries and later read, this could cause tracking problems. I repeated my tests using Duracell Alkaline batteries and the results were the same.

Summary :
Probably not a bad mount if one intended only using a DSLR with a short lens ( say 100mm ) and short exposures. But for my purposes, definetly not to be recommended. For almost the same money, one can buy the EQ5, which is much heavier ie not so portable, but more stable ie can carry more load and will track better. After talking with my mate Johny, I ended up going for the HEQ5 – more expensive but much better tracking. His setup weighs ( at a guess ) 7kg, has a focal length of some 800mm and he can track unguided for 5 minutes - now that's astrophotography !