Savox SC-1258TG

Got these at great price from Heliguru.sg

Did a very short write-up on it.

From savox

From savox

From savox

From savox

From savox

From savox

Mounting hardware and servo horns that came with the savox. Funny that they gave BIG servo mounting screws and nuts that I have never seen before. Probably more for mounting the servo in buggy and car.
One thing I really like about these is that they are using the typical 3mm screw size for servo horn screw.

From savox

The different horn sizes...unforunately, none of the pre-drilled holes are suitable in terms of arm length for my heli..

From savox

Which means that I had to get this...

From savox

Just so unforunately I got the J ones, which is for JR and those for futaba's are out of stock.

From savox

From savox

From savox

From savox

From savox

Pardon the very messy everything because I crashed the 700N 3 months back and till now then repair. Lots of things were ripped out during the repair...

My 2cents on the servo...

Packaging/Hardware
Very nicely sealed plastic box that assures you that it is brand new and never been opened before, definately one notch above all the others out there. Something that even the more expensive servos out that can't match. The hardware supplied is definately ample and the horns are quite stiff too.

Build quality
These are actually one notch above the ino-lab 760mg that I had in this heli. Plastic is thicker and metal gear appears to be better machined than the ino-lab ones. However, one thing that that I don't understand is, why do they just so stubbornly refuse to goop the servo wire-PCB solder joint. My cheaper hitec's is like that, my ino-lab's is also like that. Hai. One thing I am a bit puzzled is why the servo screws got rubber o-ring, but servo case don't have? Heat sink seems to be not secured to the motor inside, which might reduce the efficiency of the heatsink. Overall, acceptable for me, but don't expect the build quality of a expensive futaba BLS, but those are like so much more expensive and made in Taiwan also.

On the bench
Initially I thought the servo was going to be quite bad in ability to hold position under load because of that video by Chance where you can see the swash jumping up and down when he use his finger to press. I of course have the same problem, but what I found out is that it is actually due to somewhere in the linkage along the servo to swash coz the servo arm didn't appear to move that much when I force them.

Resolution wise, there is slight amount of jumpiness through the swash movement, just very very slight. Not sure where the jumpiness is coming from, because the servos actually has decent resolution from the fact that I can get it to move with every 0.5% change of the pitch curve point value and my TX pitch curve point value actually ranges from -152.5% to 152.5%.

Speed wise I really cannot get the speed in the video, probably due to my finger and voltage. I am running 5.3v now, which probably slows it down to something like 0.095s w/o load.

I can't really give any flight report yet, coz I haven't been flying for quite a while. After a short 5mins flight this morning, all I can say is, they draw pretty much the same amount of power as other coreless digital, nothing significantly more or less. Control and resolution seems perfectly fine to me, but don't take my word for it, coz right now even a 50 size is very powerful to me.

After a bit more time...

The servos are still working fine and not sure why, starting to get those jumpy movement on the bench also. Not as bad as the ino-lab though. In flight cannot feel anything. They consume very little power and run cool. Very smooth flying servos that work for me.

Very happy with the camera also. All except photo no.10 were taken with the 50mm f/1.8.

My New Hobby AKA I Kanna the ShutterBug

Yes, I mentioned that the 90 size crash and stopping of R/C flight was actually a blessing in disguise...You see, I have always wanted a better camera than the two compacts that I have because it gets a little hard to produce sharp pictures with them especially when I am fixing my heli in the middle of the night in my not so well lit kitchen. For those who are wondering whats the link between kitchen and heli, basically I am very particular(or some call OCD-obsessive compulsive disorder) about keeping not scratching my flooring in other parts of the house, so the kitchen which has ceramic tiles becomes the place where I build and rebuild pretty much ALL my R/C.

The reason I want a DSLR is soley for the low light capability, basically high iso and larger aperture. It is perfectly possible to produce good pictures with a compact camera, but the problem with them is that in a dimly lit room, you need to increase the exposure time to keep the ISO(refer to 1. at the end of article) low for nice and clean photos. In normal situations, I can do handheld exposure of up to 1/3 second because the built-in stablisation of my compact is really quite good. However, building a heli in the middle of the night is not normal and most of the time, I am tired and my hands are sore, which all add to shaky hands and blur pictures.

And so with a little bit of budget, I set out to buy my first DSLR a month ago when my school holiday really started. I had originally wanted to get a Nikon D90 with a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens. However, the Tamron was really slow in auto focus and the D90 did not come with micro-focus adjustment, which is used when your lens and camera body are not "in sync" with each other. What happens is that your camera body want to focus on the middle point, but the lens end up focusing on something a little in front or a little behind thereby causing a slight out-of-focus. It can be solved by calibration at the service center, but that would mean having to go down to the service center every time you get a new len. I didn't thought it was such a biggie until I tried a D90 at the shop and it was constantly back-focusing with both kit lens and the the Tamron.

That pushed me towards the canon 50D, which although had a nosier sensor, came with the AF-microadjustment function. I was certain I was going to buy it when I started playing with it and realise that it came with a jog-wheel and joystick EXACTLY LIKE HOW THE FUTABA 10C that I had. As for lens, I settled for the kit lens over the tamron because it focus faster and the image quality is not really that bad. Best of all, the price tag was smaller and it came with image stabilisation which the Tamron does not have. However, the Tamron will probably be great for low light because it has a larger aperture. Consider a larger aperture as a larger hole for light to go in, so obviously more light will enter in the same amount of time. So the difference between the Tamron and the canon 18-55 kit lens is that one came with stabilisation, one came with a bigger aperture(refer to 2. at end of article).So it was the 50D+18-55 kit lens.



Everything that came along with the kit, including memory card and bag.


Bulk of the cost, the Canon 50D body. It is suppose to be "semi-pro" camera body, but I feel that it is more of a hobbyist-consumer body.


Canon 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 IS kit lens attached. While it is really cheap and plasticky, the image quality really isn't that bad.


The jog-dial and joystick that is commonly found in futaba TX and on all the TX that I use/used.


The excitment and happiness of buying the camera was just like when I got my Trex 700N. Something that words cannot describe.
Here are some photos I took using the kit lens, nothing impressive, but good enough for my use. I thnk it is more of a issue with the user rather than the camera or lens.

Although the high iso is not as great as the nikon, some high ISO sample shots of my Ino-lab servos proved to be ok. Photographers might look a crop from the 100% photos, but how often will we really use that 15megapixels?

ISO200 Noise Reduction(NR) STD


ISO1600 NR STD


ISO3200 NR STD


ISO3200 NR HIGH


ISO6400 NR STD


ISO6400 NR HIGH


ISO12800 NR STD


ISO12800 NR HIGH


ISO3200 is perfectly usable for me and banding starts to appear at ISO6400. ISO12800 is really quite bad and not something that I will ever use.

In addition to the kit lens, I also got a canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens which to me is really sharp and really bright. Again, it is really cheap too, at just $130. I settled for these cheap lenses because of my limited budget and I really don't see the need for expensive lenses yet. I mean these lens are way more than sharp enough for me, just that they feel a little cheap and plastic. More about it another day...

1.For those who don't know, ISO is basically the light sensitivity of the sensor. When you have a higher ISO, the sensor in your digital camera can capture more light in the same amount of time than at lower ISO, therefore, higher ISO means that you can reduce your exposure time required for photos of proper brightness. However, as ISO increases, noise starts coming in and it can be observe in the form of those grains and coarse looking texture, especially in the shadow region. Therefore, we tend to try to keep the ISO low for shooting. As sensor size increases, the high ISO noise reduces, which is why most DSLR have better high ISO photos than compacts because of their much larger sensor. However, not all DSLR have the same sensor size, some are larger(and more expensive), some are smaller and equally expensive. Mine happens to be somewhere in between. In heli term it is like comparing a 90size(Large sensor), 50size(medium size sensor) and micro electrics(small size compact camera sensor) and it doesn't require a Ph.d to know which is nicer to use, although all can work great in the right hands- just not mine.

2. Stabilisation allows you to have longer exposure when taking photos, so more light can enter into the sensor. What the stabilisation does is to compensate for movement of the camera due to handshake when the camera is taking a photo.

A larger aperture on the other hand allows more light to enter in the same amount of time, so your camera spend less time trying to capture the image.

The main difference is that stabilisation minimize the effect of motion-blur created by the photographer, while a larger aperture and shorter exposure time will minimise motion-blur created due to movement of the subject in the photo. I.E. You want a big aperture for moving stuff like a flying heli in a cloudy overcast day, you want stabilisation for taking photo of a static heli in the same cloudy overcast day.

So how powerful a computer do you need to run Realflight G4?

A while back, I started playing some games like call of duty-world at war, grid and farcry 2. However, the low end card I have in my computer proved to be a very severe bottleneck to the smoothness of the game. While those game were not as demanding as realflight G4, they were somehow still unplayable on my Geforce 7300. Coupled with the fact that I had always wanted a more powerful card for running realflight in the rendered fields, I started looking at a graphic card upgrade. It was obviously stupid for a person like me who so rarely play games to be spending a lot on a GFX, so my I wanted something that is cheap, good and supported by my other components in my current com.

And with my tiny budget... I got a Asus EAH4830

From 50D

It is the slightly overclocked version of the standard ATI 4830 and is cheap and good enough for the 1280x1024 resolution that I run my games and simulator at. This is a full size, dual slot card which is quite a bit longer than my old card and requires one PCI-E power connector, which just so forunately is supported by my P.S.U.

From 50D

From 50D

And this is how it looks like when installed in my rig. I was lucky enough that it fits my small casing after I shifted the harddisk down. Just a bit longer and I will probably have to change the casing with computer for videos in my bedroom which has a old and ugly full size tower.

From 50D

From 50D

This card is IMPRESSIVE. At my monitor's native resolution of 1280x1024, everything was much much quicker during gameplay and there was no lag even during large explosion. Impressive card.

Now the important part...How does Realflight G4.5 runs with this?
Good enough for me. For the rendered fields which my previous card was struggling to do, framerate never for once, dropped below 30fps with this new card. That is, even with all the bloom effect, shadows, soft shadow and what not turned on the max.

Night flying in the circus looks awesome and is perfectly playable now. On my old card, I was more like looking at slide show, rather than flying.

Water flying is the tricky bit. With all the effects turned on to the max, I am still not getting the 30fps that Iwant. It hovers somewhere around 25.5-27fps, which I guess is good enough considering that this is a budget gaming card. I suspect the bottleneck is my cpu which is the first generation core 2 duo.

All in all, it was well worth the money and it is something that I regret not doing earlier.

However, there is one tiny problem. Because of the amount of power that it consumes in gameplay, it produces a lot of heat that my mini-tower finds hard to dissipate. System temperature shot up by a whole 4 degree when I am playing game and my P.S.U. seems to be running a low warmer. Probably need one or two more fans to increase air circulation in the casing.