Arsenal 2

This thing takes one shot, and loses connection to camera or locks up. Focus stack, gets one pic then locks up and loses connection to camera. I will try a different cable, someone else said their cables are junk. We shall see. Update: I finally got it to connect and stay connected, but only if both camera and arsenal have charged batteries. I had 25% charge on camera, but a fresh battery in and it worked great. But that means holy grail timelapse may suffer on long timelapse shots.

I’ve been using Arsenal 2 for several months now, and it is useful for a lot of different things, but the deep color feature, the main reason I got Arsenal 2, has some serious problems. You’d think that since it’s only affecting contrast, color, and exposure, the AI would be able to zero in on just those areas, but, at least on my Arsenal 2, deep color only has a clear single image if the slider is at the far left (no changes) or the far right (100% changed) only. Anything in-between is blurry and looks like multiple exposures misaligned, and many of my photos would benefit in that area between 0-100 if I’m just doing that simple adjustment in-app vs importing into Lightroom or another editing program. I’ve been shooting astro scapes for over a decade; and I decided to try the night mode on Arsenal 2 to see what it would give me. This is another major disappointment… If you want pinpoint stars, just stick to manual mode and learn the proper settings for your camera, latitude, aperture, and focal length… then adjust your ISO accordingly…. You can even use those settings through Arsenal 2’s app directly, and it will save you so many headaches than trying to do the night mode. Every single time I tried to do a night photo through the app’s night mode feature, it either had star trails (too long of an exposure time), or the exposure itself was too far over or underexposed to get anything useful.

I just got my Arsenal 2 today. I tried focus stacking using my Sony A7 RIII with very poor results. First, it takes forever to shoot the photos. You would think it could snap five photos in a matter of seconds but it actually takes several minutes. I was stunned by how long it took. From there things only got worse. I tried waiting patiently for the photos to appear in the gallery within the app and the stacked photo to be created. It never succeeded. Some of the photos would appear in the gallery but never all of them. Consequently the merged stack was never created. I waited at least ten minutes each time. Also, the battery runs down quickly. I don’t see how you could possibly shoot a long time lapse without the battery going dead. If this is the best I can expect I’ll be sending it back. I was so hopeful but my hopes were dashed.