Customer Reviews

Celestron 94178 NexImage Reducer Lens

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I purchased the Celestron NexImage Reducer from Amazon along with the NexImage CCD camera and just received them. The camera is great but there are issues with the reducer. First, it comes with NO instructions of any kind. I spent a few hours researching online to figure out the many caveats for this item's use. Second, I was disappointed with the item's quality. It has a light, plastic feel and the threads are poorly machined. Many people have had issues with cross-threading, but so far I've been lucky. Also, the threads are not standard gauge. The Reducer can only be threaded onto the NexImage camera and nothing else. Third, the lense in the Reducer was held in place by a small metal bezel ring that was loose and allowed the lense to rattle in its seat. I finally tightened it down, which stopped the rattling. Fourth, even when used correctly, this lense reduced the clarity of images. I suspect that the optics are poor or badly aligned.

If there were instructions, they should state the following important points: The reducer needs to be screwed directly into the body of the NexImage camera after removing the short barrel that comes with the NexImage. It should not be screwed onto the end of the NexImage camera barrel. Once attached, the Reducer should not be inserted all the way into your reflector telescope's eyepiece receiver. You should only insert the first 1/2 inch or so, then tighten it in place. If you insert it all the way, you will not be able to achieve focus. The Reducer (and the camera for that matter) cannot be used with eyepieces. The camera is equivalent to a 5mm fixed eyepiece. The reducer is used to enlarge the field of view (i.e. to reduce the magnification). Without the reducer, the moon completely fills the field of view several times over. With the reducer, you see about 1/2 of the moon in your field of view. To get a full disk view of the moon, you'd need to get a different reducer lense. You will not want to use the Reducer lense for planetary imaging, only for lunar, solar or star field imaging. When imaging planets, you do not want to reduce magnification for a wider view. You want to do quite the opposite, so this lense is has limited applications.

All in all, I was a a bit disappointed with this purchase, but for the money ($19) I guess I can't complain too much.

There were three problems with this item:

1) It rattled. I'm no optics engineer, but I'm fairly certain optics are not suppose to rattle.

2) It doesn't work -- everything is blurry and smeared.

3) There are no instructions or even a description of what it should or shouldn't do, such as rattle.

Other than that it's a lovely black tube. Very black and tuby.

Having read a helpful review here that contains the instructions this item should have come with I will give it another shot. So far it's useless and worthless.

I bought this so that I could get more of the moon into view with the Celestron NexImage camera.

The Bad:
Quality control is pretty poor on this item. The threads aren't very precise or cross-threaded (perhaps the Neximage) so I couldn't tighten down the lense to the bottom of the Neximage. I also see something hanging from the side of one of the internal elements in a manner that partially overlaps the lens element.

The Good:
This thing is dirt cheap at $24.

This reducer is for the Celestron NexImage Camera. It greatly reduces the amount of focusing needed to bring an object into focus for video or still capture. I use it with a Celestron Nexstar 130 SLT and it takes very nice images. The reducer end is threaded and will accept filters as does the NexImage camera's short barrel
The only problems I have with the reducer is it seems to be smaller than the 1.25" barrel size and fits a bit loose you have to adjust it in the eyepiece focuser assembly and tighten it with both thumb screws.
Overall its worth the cost and reduces the time it takes to focus on an object.

Despite the "less than stellar" reviews, I bought this to help with webcam (Neximage) imaging using a small 4" SCT. I found that my telescope magnification at prime focus with the NexImage webcam was too high to photograph the full moon. I had hoped this reducer would allow more or all of the moon to fit into the field of view. I received it and everything was in order - intact and no problems threading it onto my NexImage. Unfortunately, I found that the moon and jupiter showed no noticable decrease in size on my monitor but the image quality suffered greatly to the point of being unusable for Jupiter and not so good for the moon. Without the reducer I can obtain decent images of jupiter including belts and some minor cloud bands. With the reducer, I got only a whitish blob with pronounced chromatic aberation. Image stacking and color balancing was not able to remedy this. Using the reducer for visual observation seemed to be better but I had no reason to use it for visual observation.

In the end I ended up returning this and forfeited shipping costs since I can't say it was broken (just disappointing).