Problems with video acquisition using a Celestron digital imager HD 5MP on a mac osx

Hardware
,
1

Hi All, recently I bought a Celestron digital imager HD 5MP for microscopy. It’s very neat and slips into the eyepiece slot, and I used it for a science exhibition demo to show live bacteria in bright field.
However, while the product claims to integrate with software on Win10 and mac osx systems, I have found while on a Win10 machine it’s all good, I for Mac OSX it’s another matter.come to For acquisition software to do BOTH video and still images it has to be Win10. On most Macs (not v old) that I’ve tested it, still image acquistion work but video does not. It’s wierd because I imagine that if the camera stream can be captured video should be more of the same (pardon my hardware ignorance). Having said that with PhotoBooth I can (on the same machine) get video. But the contrast adjustments and exposure settings in the Celestron software are gone! 20 emails to support later I’m at the verge of buying an old Windows computer. So before I do that here is an attempt to ask the wider world:

  1. Does anybody kbow if the Celestron 5MP camera software can be made to acquire video on a Mac Osx using some 3rd party software?
  2. I can use a Mac Osx 10.13.* to take videos using PhotoBooth. But the frame rate is wierd and uncalibrated and no adjustments possible at acquisition time. Any solution?

References

hardware link for Celestron digital microscope imager 5mp 5MP Digital Microscope Imager | Celestron

acquisition software link for mac Osx: https://celestron-site-support-files.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/support_files/Celestron%20Digital%20Imager%20HD%20V1.0.dmg.zip

2

I think that this camera is UVC (USB Video Class) compatible based on it working with PhotoBooth. So you might try some other OS-X UVC camera viewer apps to see if they will do what you want. A Google search for “os-x uvc camera viewer” gives some options such as QUVCView.

1 Like