Seestar S30 or S50? Full Comparison Review
This video is sponsored by Squarespace. This is the new Seestar S30 and this is the Seestar S50. These are both smart telescopes made byZWO who sent me these for this review. On paper, these have a very similar feature set and of course the obvious difference between the two is the size and the price. To make it smaller like they did ZWO needed to use a smaller telescope this is the
telescope right here the 30 versus 50 refers to the diameter in millimeters of the front aperture of the internal refractor telescope inside each of these and a smaller telescope like in the s30 has certain trade-offs since ZWO is using the same pixel size and sensor size in each telescope the S50 should be able to resolve smaller details while the S30 will have a larger field of view meaning it takes in more of the sky. But what I really want to show in this video is what all of this information means in practice and so that's what I'm going to show in this video. It's going to be a direct comparison between the S30 and the S50 on the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter and of course nebulae in both normal mode and the new mosaic mode which expands the field of view. And lastly we're going to compare printed photos from each telescope. [Music] When using either telescope on the sun you need to install the included solar filter. This is absolutely necessary for solar safety and to protect the equipment. One thing I appreciate about the Seestar design is that you
can actually close the telescope arm completely with the filter installed there's just enough clearance to make that work the S30 solar filter is much improved in my eyes because it still holds on very strongly but it's much easier to remove due to being magnetic rather than just a tight friction fit like on the S50 so for total solar eclipse Imaging the S30 is going to have a huge advantage um because the S50 solar filter is much harder to take take out once you reach totality and that's a very important moment and having an easy to remove solar filter is really nice both telescopes can at least attempt to find the sun automatically but they're often going to fail at this task and their failure mode is a little bit different though because the S30 has an additional camera system camera and lens system it's it's and that camera system is very nice for finding the sun because it's a wide field system well with the S50 you're on your own when it fails to find the sun um and what I found is useful with the S50 is to tape a small solar Finder right on top of the telescope arm and that allows you to very quickly line up the telescope arm with the sun my favorite solar finder uh is just $1 it's a downspout clip from Home Depot using either method either my DIY solar finder or the wide field camera on the S30 as a solar finder I can find the sun very quickly manually just using the on-screen controls the on-screen joystick um but I will give the S30 points here for having that finder built in while with the S50 it's something that I have to remember to bring with me and there's no place for it necessarily in the case once you have found the sun you can press this button to have the sear track the Sun and keep it centered in frame which from my experience does work very well. Autofocus on the sun is also uh usually quite accurate from what I've seen um but I will say that the solar that you know the sun is at maximum right now in terms of solar activity so there are usually sunspots which I'm sure helps with the autofocus. Let's now compare the image results and as you can see the sun fits pretty snugly in frame with the S50 while there is much more breathing room around it with the S30 field of view the wider field of view would be pretty nice for a total solar eclipse uh with the S30 because you should be able to capture more of the sun's corona um but for regular solar observing I'd prefer the images from the S50 because it clearly resolves better details on solar features like sunspots moving on to the moon it's a pretty similar story to the sun it's another object that the Seestars will not always succeed in finding automatically and when they do fail to find the moon automatically they ask you to find the moon manually using the onscreen controls here the S30 has a clear advantage um because using its Widefield camera system I can quickly just navigate to the bright moon using the joystick and that will center it in the main Imaging camera sensor. Since the S50 doesn't have that secondary camera it's more trial and error um just sort of looking behind the telescope and trying to line it up with the moon and moving it around um until the you know you see that like glow from the moon's brightness and then you can move it into on screen. It usually doesn't take too long uh but it does take a little bit of practice but once the Moon is found I think the S50 again has the clear advantage in photography of the Moon just like with the sun due to its larger aperture it's able to resolve smaller details which will make the Moon looks sharper and then also more detailed of course especially when you zoom in at this level of Zoom the S30 data looks sort of pixelated uh while the S50 data is still showing better resolution in both you know details and depth and you can see some nice gradients in the Maria here next up we have Jupiter both the S30 and the S50 were able to find Jupiter automatically Fair fairly quickly because Jupiter is so bright that it can't use star patterns to orient itself and figure out where Jupiter should be when you go into planetary mode and slew to Jupiter it will be on automatic exposure and Jupiter itself will be completely blown out but by being blown out it allows us to see the Galilean moons the larger moons orbiting Jupiter and it's pretty cool to see you know moons other than our moon orbiting another planet um so I think ZWO definitely made the right call in making this Auto exposure on planetary very bright and it's very similar between the S30 and the S50 you're more zoomed in on the S50 but it doesn't really make any difference I wouldn't really say one has a clear advantage here when I brought down the exposure manually about as low as it can possibly go on the S30 I can still not make out really anything I can't make out any surface details well on the S50 I can actually see two cloud bands on the surf surface of Jupiter which is pretty cool. I think you know if you're new to astronomy maybe this is your first telescope that
would be really neat to say go to Jupiter and zoom in and see those Cloud bands now you would have to know how to manually change the exposure to see those but it's still pretty cool so if you're new to astronomy the S50 is definitely going to be the winner for planetary Imaging but neither of these smart telescopes that's that's not really the focus of them of course. Moving on to my favorite kind of astrophotography and one in which these do surprisingly well is deep sky objects both telescopes can find and track deep sky objects automatically and I have found that that does work very well uh when I would start up um both the S30 and the S50 at the same time and go to the same object I'd always find that they' basically tie like they'd be on the object ready to go within seconds of each other so neither telescope really has an advantage in terms of finding deep sky objects they both do it quickly and accurately the other thing that I was a little bit surprised about is neither had a strong advantage in battery life which is important when capturing deep sky objects because a lot of times we want to expose them for long periods of time hours is preferable to get enough signal strength to actually get a good picture and so I found that I tested them night after night and they would the battery would drain at exactly the same rate between these two smart telescopes they also performed identically when it came to all other software features autofocus all these kinds of things so really the only difference comes down to sampling and field of view and sampling means how much sky fits into a single pixel on the sensor and field of view means how much sky is taken up by the full sensor so your full picture one criticism I had of the S50 in my previous review is that uh several of the most popular deep Sky objects were sort of cut off strangely due to its tight field of view so I was excited to try the S30 since it has a much more generous field of view which should be good for these bigger objects um but then right when I received the S30 I noticed ZWO released a new framing mode in the Seestar software and this framing mode allows for basically mosaics uh meaning the field of view can be twice as big by taking many little tiles and putting those all into one bigger picture and it also allows for rotation of sorts it's not that the sensor can physically rotate inside the sea star it's just that by building up a mosaic image of many tiled images you can now Orient your picture into different rotations so this was again a huge Improvement for the Seestar S50 but then it also sort of made me question well is the S30 as necessary and the the answer is yes but it gets a little bit complicated because a mosaic mode is very different than the normal mode and that it'll take up a lot longer to build up enough integration which a lot of people aren't going to want to do so for instance if you make your if you take the framing mode and you make it two times bigger that's actually a four times bigger image because it's going two times bigger in both directions so to get an equal signal strength you would actually have to expose for four times longer so if you're used to exposing a deep Sky object for a half hour in the Mosaic mode with the maximized framing you'd have to capture for two hours four times as long and but I definitely appreciate that the sear app tells you this right up front um with a recommendation uh when you are in the framing mode and I very much appreciate that ZWO added this mode because to me it really opens up a lot of creativity with these devices and it's available the framing mode on both telescopes of course the S30 and the S50 um so let's look at M45 the Pleiades in normal mode with the S30 on the left and the S50 on the right in this mode I much prefer the S30 framing as the S50 framing feels a little bit too cropped in for my taste at least now let's look at the Mosaic mode on that same object and 45 with the magnification set to all the way out so a two times um expanded field of view this is the s30 framing on top and this is the S50 framing on bottom and now it's a much closer uh match right or a harder comparison to sort of pick a favorite is I like both framings for different reasons but for my taste I tend to like wide field images so I prefer the s30 in both normal mode and Mosaic mode for me it's a much more useful field of view creatively for deep Sky compositions now let me show you another example of what I mean I spent a couple nights capturing data on a difficult object for the Seestars this is the Boogeyman nebula and after my best attempt at processing here's the result with the S50 and here's the result with the S30 and while it's uh true that the S50 is technically resolving more detail it feels to me too zoomed in given the capability of these telescopes while the s30 feels like a better match in terms of focal length when you go after difficult objects like this and I think it makes for a much better composition as well by having these two bright stars and this extended dark nebulosity to anchor the boogeyman within the scene and this is of course just one example but it's not cherry-picked again and again for me me looking at nebula scenes I found the S30 field of view both in normal and Mosaic mode easier to work with in terms of composition and framing now one other difference worth mentioning between the S30 and S50 is the included tripod and I almost forgot to include this because personally I don't use the included tripods when testing the sea stars as I have a variety of much better tripods that are much easier for me to use um and so I usually put these on aluminum Manfrotto tripods um where I can raise them up to a better level to work with um but let's say you don't have a better tripod at home in that case the tripod that comes with the S50 is better than the S30 tripod and I'm guessing that's where some of the cost savings to bring the price of the S30 down $150 from the S50 came in it isn't easy to level on uneven ground but it is at least possible by adjusting the legs to different heights uh the s30 tripod has no leveling feature um it's basically just a tripod that allows you to get the Seestar S30 off the ground uh last but not least I wanted to talk about printing your astrophotography from the sear and this is a question that I often get asked and I wanted to see for myself what kind of results I could get with printing the sear images onto photo paper I first just printed out the 27 minute stacks in normal mode at 350 DPI on this Canon glossy 4x6 in paper and I didn't make any adjustments to the images these are just straight prints with the correct printer profiles and I actually think they came out really nice um good details and a nice high contrast look to them with this glossy paper next up I used a higher end paper a Canson Baryta photographique this is a high quality semi gloss paper it's a bit thicker and I printed the three-hour stacks done in Mosaic mode also at 350 DPI which puts these prints at 11 in across so quite a bit bigger and these look pretty good too I did make some adjustments to try to bring out the dust a little bit and I think from my experience with printing the SNR the signal to noise ratio isn't good enough here to really bring out the Dust for a print um because there's just not enough contrast there um without making pictures too noisy so that tells you something that the dust around the pleiades will need more than 3 hours in Mosaic mode with either the S30 or the S50 if you plan to print but other than that I think this is pretty cool that due to the Mosaic mode we actually have enough resolution that we can print twice as large in both directions and make a nice 8 by10 in or A4 print you're just going to have to pile on the exposure time if you're going after something dim so to wrap up and give my final recommendations I would say the S50 is clearly more the Jack of all traits it does a better job delivering details on the Moon Sun and planets due to its uh slightly larger telescope and thanks to Mosaic mode it also does a nice job on a really wide variety of deep sky objects now um if you aren't someone like me who has tons of better tripods to use then the S50 is tripod is also a better option than the S30 so if the S50 is the better all arounder why do I personally much prefer the S30 this is the one that I would keep if I could only keep one well for the two kinds of astrophotography I'm most interested in personally which are large nebula and nebula scenes and total solar eclipses for those two kinds of astrophotography I think the S30 is a huge improvement over the S50 for the next several total solar eclipses I'm going to have to fly halfway around the world to see them because there's a path of totality and it's not going through America um and if I bring a smart telescope which I'd like to it needs to take up as little room as possible to bring with me in my carry-on luggage um because I'm also going to be bringing other photography gear so it's not just the smart telescope if it was just the smart telescope maybe the S50 would work but I want to bring my normal camera and lenses plus a smart telescope and in that case the S30 is the clear winner and then the cherry on top for total solar eclipses is how ZWO really improved this solar filter making making it much easier to take off due to the magnetic attachment and so for total solar eclipses I really am thinking the S30 is going to be the winner of course the only total solar Clips I've actually captured with a smart telescope is this past one uh in 2024 and for that I was using the S50 and it did a good job except for removing that filter and then with nebula and nebula scenes with stars I already elaborated on why I personally much prefer the field of view with the s30 but I want to emphasize that's just my personal preference even if you're primarily interested in shooting nebula with these smart telescopes um take a look at my samples uh my sample images because you still may prefer the field of view with the S50 I just am sort of a wide field kind of guy and so I like the S30 with everything else the feature set of these for astrophotography at least is incredibly similar the only real difference other than size price and field of view is that the S30 comes with that secondary Widefield camera system that is useful for finding the Sun and Moon manually when it can't find them automatically if you do use them in scenery mode which I didn't cover in this review um you know daytime shooting that Widefield camera could again be useful for finding things like finding birds and and so forth well that's it for sort of this Roundup of these two telescopes and hopefully this review was helpful if you have any questions about them feel free to ask in the comments this video is sponsored by Squarespace so if you want control over how you display your astrophotography online you need a personal website and Squarespace makes that easy thanks to their design system called Squarespace blueprint whether you need an online Gallery a storefront or a Blog you'll find that there is a template that fits your needs and is easy to customize to make it your own another thing that I appreciate about squir space is how much is built in and ready to use if you want your website to sell products prints or Services Squarespace has that as a store integration that makes it very easy allowing customers to pay however is best for them whether it's PayPal credit card or afterpay so if you'd like to give this a try head to squarespace.com nebula photos for a free trial when ready to make a purchase of Hosting or a domain use code nebula photos for 10% off till next time this has been Nico Carver, Clear skies!
2025-01-29 11:23
