digiscoping

[ctdad]

I bought my first spotting scope this winter and I want to get set up for taking pics with it. I do have a small nikon camera, but I'm not opposed to upgrading. I'm not familiar with what I need to connect a camera to the scope. What do you guys use?

[dotman]

Checkout the adapters from Tines Up, they can make one for any spotter and they have a kit with camera or if you want to use your phone use the phone skope adapter with your cell phone camera.

From what I have learned you want less then 5x zoom and 10mega pixel camera for best results which is getting hard to find. I pretty much found out about all these little details in the past year so I'm just restating what I have read.

[ctdad]

To be clear, less than 5x zoom and less than 10 megapixel? Or did you mean less than 5 zoom and at least 10 megapix?

[dotman]

For a P/S you want 5x optical zoom or less, this will reduce the black ring called vinyetting (spelling). The higher the megapixels, size of picture the harder for the camera to process the image in the spotting scope vs not in the spotting scope so you can get distortion I believe. I use a Panasonic Lumix DMC-F5 but the Tines-Up kit comes with a Cannon elph 110. It is hard to find a 10 megapixel or less camera and mine at 14 does good so try to keep it close to 10 but don't get a 28 etc.

Also Phone Skope just confirmed they are making an adapter for cameras and go-pro video cameras so that is what I'll be using for the adapter to the spotter. I had a tines-up video cam adapter with the zeikos adapter and just didn't like it and didn't want to epoxy their mount to my camera.

Using a DSLR camera is a different game I'm not up on.