DWARF 3 Announced – one of our favourite Smart Telescopes receives a big upgrade

It’s no secret that we’re all very fond of the DWARF II Smart Telescope here at BINTEL. Some of our staff have even purchased one for their own personal use!

Overnight, our friends at DWARF Lab announced their new telescope, which is unsurprisingly called the DWARF 3.

This is a considerable upgrade to the DWARF II while keeping the things that made the DWARF II such a popular gizmo – it’s small size and extreme portability.

The new DWARF 3 on the left compared with the original DWARF II on the right

What was upgraded?

There’s probably two major factors that will make a big difference to astrophotographers as well as bird photographers and nature fans in general.

The first is an increase in the size of the main lens. DWARF have increased the aperture of their new, APO style lens from 24mm to 35mm. This will mean more detail for both astro and terrestrial images. If you’re thinking of the DWARF 3 for wildlife or scenery, the new lenses mean it’s roughly equal to a DSLR 737mm telephoto lens and a 45mm wide angle lens.

The camera sensor has also received a major upgrade to a Sony IMX 678 Starvis with a bump in pixel size.

This brings longer exposures with less background noise. Full support for EQ mode shooting as well as DWARF enabling astro imaging with the wide angle lens point to the DWARF 3 as possibly being a fantastic gizmo for large scale, Milky Way and night sky panorama photography. While it probably won’t replace for everyone the conventional way of taking these sorts of images (say a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i + a tripod + your DSLR camera and lens), the portability of the DWARF 3 might make a handy companion for nightscape fans.

The DWARF 3 mosaic mode with the option for EQ mounting also means it will be capable of imaging larger deep-sky nebulae and clusters.  Maximum single exposure has also been increased to 60 seconds.

Included are new filters to help improve both daytime and night time photography as well. These also include a Duo-band filter to assist with taking astro images in areas with light pollution . They’re also internal and can be selected by the DWARF app. External Solar filters for photographing the Sun are included, as they were with the DWARF II deluxe package.

The DWARF app  itself has also received a major boost.

There’s AI powered noise reduction to help bring out the details on the image captured by the telescope. This handy when you have to take astro photos in light polluted or not perfectly clear nights.

DWARF have also implemented “One-Click Shooting” that leaves behind many of the complexities normally associated with astrophotography to help beginners start their astro imaging journey. However manual control over just about every aspect of the imaging process is still on offer for more experienced folks including file export to not just JPG, PNG but also TIFF and even FITS.

The new Astro Plan feature also lets you plan an entire evening of astrophotography ahead of time and then simply leave the DWARF 3 to do its thing while you snooze. (And yes, you can leave the DWARF 3 out in the open with its new IP54 weather proofing.)

There also new features that will especially appeal to bird watchers.

The DWARF 3 will not just follow a bird as the DWARF II currently does, but will use both cameras to re-locate the bird if it suddenly takes flight and automatically continue to track it. Species identification has been added as well.

There’s an extended “giga pixel” panorama feature to let you build massive, large images that can be zoomed in into to see details.  Basically, the astro mosaic feature but for daytime and landscape photography.

There are a few other changes such as larger internal memory and built-in battery as opposed to the removable battery of the DWARF II.   Despite these changes including the big bump in the lens size, the DWARF 3 is only around a 100g heavier than the DWARF II and only a few mm larger on all sides. It will only come in one version that will include a bag and accessories.

We’ll give the DWARF 3 a thorough test of all the new hardware and software features as soon as we can. However, from what we’ve seen so far, the DWARF 3 looks like a very impressive little telescope.

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL

31st May 2024