I agree with what you say Christine, but I find digiscoping difficult whichever method one uses! When I tried with a compact and scope I found the following problems:
1) The compact I have is a Canon G5 which gives terrible vignetting with a scope so make sure you have the right compact. Good camera in general use.
2) The compacts in those days had terrible shutter delay and although modern ones are better the problem is still there. This means one often misses the "magic moment" when the bird turns its head to the right position or the wader brings its head up for a split second. With my G5 the bird had probably flown before the shutter finally trippped!
3) I never liked just holding the camera up to the scope for fear of damaging the lenses. This means that the camera is on the scope all the time and the scope has to be used via the screen. This then results in the battery dying pretty quickly so no more photos unless you buy lots more batteries or one of the expensive external batteries.
4) The compact gives huge magnification but limited shutter speeds as compacts mostly only go up to ISO 400 which is very "noisy" and unusable for enlargements. Things are improving but still limited compared to SLR. Camera shake therefore is much worse.
If I was buying now and with plenty of available funds I think I would buy a Swaro with its very neat adapter that swings down in a moment when needed with a new modern compact that does not vignette and reacts quicker plus (dream on) a Nikon ED scope with a Nikon DSLR with their adapter for the combination as that gives aperture priority automatic exposure. Oh, and someone to carry it all for me!
As I say I find it all difficult to get really good results and feel that both methods have their pros and cons. Regards, Mike.
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