Benro Connect

Backed the kickstarter campaign and with over a year of waiting I have just received my polaris today. Amazing quality of the hardware and app is also working as expected.

A kickstart hardware campaign, this is the controlling app. Some great features that partially work or have inconsistent outcomes. Yet to be supported by good documentation/guides. Fairly regularly app and firmware updates which show improvement. Happy to stay along for the ride (well I did purchase the hardware), it is a kickstarter after all. Fingers crossed as the concept is fantastic and less weight and hopefully consistently easier set up than alternatives.

This app and its capabilities renders the hardware useless. The alignment method is insufficient and it doesn’t work consistently. The UI is awful. The camera interface doesn’t function properly and overall makes this awesome hardware almost completely useless. The focusing is incredibly hard with the app and sometimes, I just align then disconnect the camera to focus and by some miracle able to take a few photos before something else goes wrong. If I knew about the horrible app experience, I would have never dropped $1200+ on the hardware. Please fix this.

The concept and idea is great. But the equipment fails and does not connect to the App when “Cellular data” is “on”. When data is turned off, it connects only to the Benro device, but after connecting all cables…the app does not connect to the live view on the camera. Canon R5

It took a week for customer service to respond to a password reset request, so that wasn’t great. We are still missing 2 star alignment, which many Astro photographers believe would significantly improve the star tracking. Holy grail seems to work well so that is positive.

Congratulations, with your latest update my phone will no longer connect! Awesome Benro!

Can’t connect to a7riii with iOS 16 without turning off cellular. Once connected you can’t get the camera in live mode so you have no visual. You can’t kill the app without resetting your phone. Returned the Benro Polaris. Nice try but it is far from a usable product.

Arrrrggggg

Useful

The Polaris was a crowd source funded product and Benro has been busy working on getting units delivered to backers while also adding promised functionality to the app. They are also listening to users who are using it in the field and are making tweaks and improvements based on these suggestions. While not perfect, the software / hardware combo is very usable for star tracking even with longer lenses (100-500mm range), panoramas and more. I give the software 5 stars because it’s very functional and getting better all the time. And Benro doesn’t deserve the 2 stars they are getting from those that seem to not realize that “Kickstarter” type purchases is like purchasing beta units are we are the beta testers. For those that have issues with firmware updates they need to do 2 important things. 1) Format the micro SD card in the Polaris right before attempting the update and 2) Make sure you have good cellular reception on your phone since your wifi is being used to connect to the Polaris. The. your firmware update will work. Keep up the good work Benro and continue to make this product better with each update.