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DwarfLab Dwarf III: Two-minute review
The Dwarflabs Dwarf III smart telescope is a mini marvel. My first astrophotography set-up 10 years ago weighed more than 20kg / 44lbs – but this excellent little self-contained device comes in at a mere 1.3kg / 2.8lbs and is small enough to fit in airline carry-on luggage.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s start with the basics.
The Dwarf III is one of the new breed of smart telescopes which simplify and automate the process of astrophotography to bring it to within easy reach of those without the time or money needed for a ‘proper’ set-up of mount, telescope and camera.
As with smart telescopes from rivals ZWO, Vaonis and Unistellar, the Dwarf III doesn’t have an eyepiece you look through, and doesn’t in any way resemble a classic telescope such as a reflector or refractor. Instead, it tracks objects in the night sky then takes photos of them and ‘stacks’ them.
This process increases the faint signal being captured in order to bring out details – because if you just looked at a single shot, you’d see very little beyond a few stars. The resulting image can be viewed in real-time as it develops on your phone’s screen, which is essentially your eyepiece.
You can see it in action below, with the fuzzy object that’s barely visible after five frames eventually becoming the recognizable Crescent Nebula after about 60 frames:
The Dwarf III has two lenses to capture its targets, one 35mm telephoto and one 3.4mm wide-angle – although the latter is mainly used for finding objects rather than shooting them.
The telephoto has a 2.9×1.7-degree field of view, which can fit the moon in it about six times and which has space for almost every galaxy and nebula you might want to capture. I go into this in more detail below, but this wide FOV is one of my favorite things about it.
Inside, there’s a 4K IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor, which is on the budget end compared to that found within dedicated cooled astronomy cameras but which delivers excellent results, helped also by the fast f/4.3 f-ratio; this captures light more quickly than some rival smart scopes.
It’s all controlled by the DwarfLab app, which gives you everything you need to take photos of the night skies without the need for you to do much more than choose your target and set it going. Even if you’ve never used a smart telescope – or any kind of telescope – before, you should be up and running within a few minutes.
In fact, roughly 20 minutes after taking it out of the box you could be viewing your first shot of wonderfully named objects such as the Elephant’s Trunk nebula or Sombrero galaxy – the Dwarf III really is that easy to set up and use.
And when you do so, I’m pretty sure you’ll be impressed, because the Dwarf III takes excellent photos given its small stature and low-ish price. It’s truly one of the best ways into this fascinating hobby.
DwarfLab Dwarf III: price and availability
The DwarfLabs Dwarf III was released in May 2025 and is competitively priced, coming in at $549 / £459 / AU$849. Depending on where you are in the world, that’s either slightly cheaper or the same price as one of its main rivals, the ZWO Seestar S50, which costs $549 / £539 / AU$949. Compared to the Seestar S30, which is a comparable size to the Dwarf III, it’s more expensive though; that model comes in at $399 / £419 / AU$699.
It’s also worth noting that unlike the two Seestar models, the Dwarf III doesn’t come with a tripod. Many keen photographers and stargazers will already own one, but if not you can buy one with the telescope for an additional $89 / £73 / AU$149. Or, of course, you can add your own; we have plenty of good options in our list of the best travel tripods. Either way, that might bump up the price a little.
DwarfLab Dwarf III: Specs
|
Aperture (tele) |
35mm |
|
Focal length (tele) |
150 mm (737mm equivalent) |
|
Aperture (wide) |
3.4mm |
|
Focal length (wide) |
6.7mm (45mm equivalent) |
|
Sensor |
Sony IMX678 STARVIS 2 |
|
Resolution (stills) |
Telephoto: 3840×2160 (4K); wide-angle: 1920×1080 (FHD) |
|
Resolution (video) |
Telephoto: 4K @ 30fps; wide-angle: 1080p @ 30fps |
|
Filters (built in) |
VIS, Astro, Dual-band |
|
Mount type |
Alt-azimuth and EQ mode |
|
Accessories |
USB-C cable, carry case, solar filter |
|
Battery life |
10,000mAh / 4 hours |
|
Charging |
USB-C |
|
Storage |
128GB |
|
Dimensions |
222x142x65mm |
|
Weight |
1.3 kg / 2.87 lbs |
DwarfLab Dwarf III: Design
Looks-wise, the Dwarf III is about as far from a traditional telescope as you could get. Powered off, it resembles a beefy external hard drive from about 2010, but turn it on to reveal the twin lenses and it’s more like some kind of futuristic security-camera-robot hybrid.
It’s actually pretty cute, with a certain Wall-E charm about it (or maybe that’s just me). Either way, it’s well built: solid, with a smooth plastic finish and an IP54 rating that keeps it safe from dust, moisture and dew.
It’s also impressively small – like, how-did-they-fit-all-that-in-there small, a feeling that only grows after you see what it’s capable of. It’s relatively light, too, at 1.3kg / 2.87lbs; that’s almost half the 2.5kg of the Seestar S50 and a little less than the S30.
There’s not a lot to look at, externally. Beyond those two lenses and the DwarfLab logo, there’s the main power button – a big circular affair that’s very easy to find in the dark and which has a glowing green ring around it – plus a battery status indicator of four green dots, and a single USB-C charging port. On the bottom, meanwhile, there’s a 1/4-inch tripod thread.
It comes with an excellent carrying case, plus a couple of accessories: a USB-C charging cable, lens wipe cloth, plus a solar filter. The latter snaps on magnetically in a pleasing fashion, and comes with a pouch to keep it safe.
Design is all very well thought out and though it’s a shame it doesn’t come with a tripod, that’s the only minus point in this regard. It’s not a massive problem, either, because many of the telescope’s intended customers will already have one, and it helps keep the price low.
I’ve been using either the Seestar S50’s tripod or a K&F Concept 64in/163cm model which costs $49 in the US, £45 in the UK and AU$150 in Australia. This is light, sturdy and has a 360-degree ballhead which makes it very easy to angle the Dwarf III for EQ mode (of which more later).
DwarfLab Dwarf III: Features and performance
The Dwarf III is a feature-rich device, with a multitude of abilities and use cases.
Obviously the first of those is to take photos of the night skies, and it does that very well thanks to its 4K Sony IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor – the same type as used in some of the best dash cams, including the Thinkware U3000 Pro. Starvis 2 is particularly strong in low light, while the IMX678’s 4K resolution gives you more pixels to work with when cropping in on small and distant objects.
The twin lenses are very helpful. The telephoto is what you’ll take most of your images with, while the wide-angle one is mainly for locating objects in the first place; you can take photos with it too, but it has a much lower resolution.
I’ve got a full gallery of astro images taken with the telescope below, but for now here’s just one, my favorite that I’ve shot with the device. It shows the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16, and if you zoom in on the middle you’ll see the famous ‘Pillars of Creation’, the swirling clouds of dust and gas that wowed the world when the Hubble telescope shot them two decades ago.
The Dwarf III has three internal filters. The most important is the dual-band filter, which targets the OIII (sulphur) and H⍺ (hydrogen) wavelengths – in layman’s terms, this means it can capture more of the faint details in nebulae and reduce the impact of light pollution. There’s also an astro filter, which extends into the infra-red range and which works best on galaxies and star clusters, and a ‘VIS’ filter which is used for daytime photography. All are easily selected within the Dwarf III’s app; you don’t need to physically attach anything.
Speaking of daytime photography, DwarfLabs make a big pitch around the telescope’s usefulness around bird watching, and theoretically you could use it instead of a mirrorless camera and telephoto lens for any subject – just don’t expect it to rival an expensive chunk of glass from Canon, Nikon or Sony.
The daytime photography (‘General’) mode includes burst and timelapse options, plus object tracking which I found to be a little hit and miss. 4K video can be recorded at up to 30fps, or 60fps if you switch to 1080p.
There’s also a solar system mode for snapping the sun, moon and (theoretically) planets, plus a panorama mode. In Astro mode, meanwhile, you can shoot in either alt-azimuth or equatorial mode.
Performance-wise, the Dwarf III is pretty snappy to turn on and off, and slews to targets quickly and reasonably quietly; it makes less noise than the Seestar S50, for instance, although neither would be likely to wake even the lightest of sleepers next door.
In use, it’s unerringly accurate in finding targets, zipping about the sky when you tell it where to go via the built-in star atlas.
It’s also incredibly reliable when shooting. If the tracking on a motorized telescope is even a tiny bit off, you’ll get star trails and the individual frame will be rejected and not included in the ‘stack’, potentially reducing detail in the final stacked image. With the Dwarf III, this almost never happened – I generally got around an 80-90% success rate, so if I shot a target for an hour, I’d get around 50 minutes’ worth of photos. This is way better than my experience than shooting with the Seestar S50, where it can be more like 50% at times.
Plus, that’s when shooting with 15-second exposures in alt-az mode; put it in EQ mode and you can get 30s shots with a similar success rate. This all makes it very easy to capture a lot of data on a target in a short time.
One of the few downsides is that the battery is not the biggest – only 10,000mAh, which is good for about 5 hours in astro mode when tracking and shooting a target, according to DwarfLab, and which was about right in my experience. You almost certainly won’t get through a full night’s shooting with it.
That said, I didn’t put it to the test often, preferring instead to leave a much bigger power bank connected to it to ensure I got a full night’s shooting. I tend to use Iniu power banks, which I’ve found to be very reliable and extremely well priced; the model below is well worth checking out and will triple the Dwarf III’s capacity.
DwarfLab Dwarf III: Software
The nature of a smart telescope means that all of your interactions with it will be via an app – it’s not like you can look through as you can with an old-school reflector or refractor.
That puts a lot of pressure on the device’s software to be slick and simple to use, and fortunately the Dwarf III’s is just that – with a few caveats.
I began using the Dwarf III several months ago, and on my first few nights shooting with it found the interface to be a little confusing. It wasn’t a horror show by any means, but it wasn’t as intuitive as ZWO’s Seestar app. For instance, I’d click on the big ‘Photo’ button front and center to start shooting a galaxy or nebula, then would realize that I’d have to go back in and select the ‘Atlas’ option to actually choose my target.
Settings for options such as exposure time, meanwhile, were hidden within a menu called ‘Function’ – which really didn’t (to me) suggest ‘Settings’. I got used to it all after a few nights, but it was a little more confusing than it could have been.
The good news is that DwarfLabs is continually updating the platform, and a recent update has massively improved the experience. Those settings are now within a menu named ‘Parameter, which is far more sensible, and the Atlas is available from within the shooting screen. There’s a simple toggle between the wide and telephoto cameras, whereas before you tapped the small one to change between them, but again without labelling. It’s all much more slick and easy to use.
(Note that most of my images in this review are using the old version of the software, because there’s not been a clear night in the UK for me to take further screenshots for what feels like about 15 years now. I’ll update them soon.)
There’s a scheduling feature within the app, which works as you’d want it to and which is better than the one in ZWO’s app. This is a vital inclusion, because most people won’t want to stay up all night – they’ll want to set the Dwarf III running with a list of targets, then wake refreshed in the morning to a lovely collection of images.
Switching to EQ mode is also pretty trouble-free. For the uninitiated, this lets the Dwarf III rotate fully in sync with the skies, meaning you can take longer exposures than in standard alt-az mode. Anything longer than 30 seconds will need to be in EQ mode (the maximum exposure is two minutes) and in my experience it’s best for 30 seconds too; alt-az mode is fine for 15s exposures.
The Dwarf III app guides you through the process of setting the telescope into EQ mode, telling you exactly which direction and what amount to adjust the tripod head by, and the whole thing only takes about five minutes, less if you haven’t moved the tripod since the previous session.
The included Stellar Studio software is also great. This lets you carry out basic processing actions on photos via the cloud, rather than needing to download them to your computer.
It’s not exactly stacked with options, but does a really good job of reducing noise, sharpening stars and bringing out details. You can also remove stars entirely if you want that lovely clean view of a galaxy or nebula.
Finally, in ‘General’ mode the app works pretty well to let you zoom in on a target. You can use the wide-angle view to get an overall view of your surroundings, then click on the screen to adjust where the telephoto lens is pointing. Another click switches to the telephoto view and you can start snapping away.
DwarfLab Dwarf III: Image quality
There’s one very important thing that anyone using a smart telescope for the first time needs to understand: you won’t be getting Hubble-challenging images straight out of the camera. Well, obviously, you won’t be getting Hubble-challenging images at all; this is a $500 smart telescope, not a rig that costs 10 times that.
But even with that in mind, there’s a big difference between the photos that the Dwarf III creates for you, and the results that you can achieve with some proper processing.
The easiest way to demonstrate that is with some before and after photos – so check out the gallery above. In every case, you’ll see the unprocessed image produced by the Dwarf III first, followed by the version I processed in Pixinsight, the specialist astrophotography software I use.
Now, let’s get one thing straight: I’m not an expert when it comes to astro image processing. It’s an incredibly complex hobby, with sometimes arcane software to master and a surprisingly large amount of technical knowledge needed to really get the best results. In fact, I think I prefer some of the Dwarf III’s images, at least when it comes to color – which is one of the toughest things to get right.
Regardless of what you think of my images (I won’t be offended, promise), you can see that processing reduces noise and brings out more detail and color. To really get the best from the Dwarf III, you will still want to do some processing.
Fortunately, as mentioned above, it’s pretty easy to considerably improve things within the Dwarf III’s Stellar Studio on your phone, with no need to shell out for or learn anything more complicated.
For instance, try the above image of the glorious East Veil nebula – the original, unprocessed image is pretty good, but Stellar Studio turns it into something epic, and my Pixinsight version is only a slight improvement (if anything).
One of the things I really love about the Dwarf III is its wide 2.9×1.7-degree field of view, even when using the telephoto camera. The Seestar S50 has a much narrower 0.7×1.2-degree FOV, while the S30 is close to the Dwarf at 1.22×2.13-degree.
The net effect of this is that you get a real sense of drama with the Dwarf III. I love the Seestar S50, but with many targets you end up with a close-up of the object. You can get around this by using mosaic mode (the Dwarf also has one of these), but in my experience mosaics take longer to shoot and are harder to process.
The Dwarf, meanwhile, almost always captures the object and its surroundings. Its field of view is wide enough to cover the whole of Andromeda, for instance, whereas the S50 gets only the central section.
Of course you may prefer a closer view of targets, but the Dwarf’s 4K resolution means you can crop in anyway and still have a decent-sized image. It’s possible that the Seestar S30 will give me the FOV I love from the Dwarf with some of ZWO’s advantages too, but I’ve not used that device yet, so that comparison will have to wait.
In general mode, image quality is fine. That’s a pretty nice shot of a pigeon on my lawn above, but view the full-size image and you’ll see the feathers lack definition. My Fujifilm X-T5 mirrorless camera would do a better job with a good zoom lens.
Solar photography, meanwhile, is easy to do – you simply snap on the filter then move to the target. Admittedly, for some reason the Dwarf finds it much harder to locate the sun than it does a tiny object many millions of light years away, but the Seestar S50 is no different in this regard.
I’ve only taken a few solar shots with the Dwarf III and was relatively impressed by them, but it’s not an area of photography I’m particularly interested in.
Should I buy the DwarfLabs Dwarf III?
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How I tested the DwarfLabs Dwarf III
I took the Dwarf III with me on vacation to Crete, Greece, where I was lucky enough to be staying in an apartment with a roof terrace – and in a country with clear skies every night. I used the smart telescope extensively over the next week or so, taking photos of multiple targets including the Eagle nebula, Omega nebula and Andromeda galaxy.
When I returned to the UK, I used it whenever I could, which unfortunately was not that often due to the clouds which blanket the nation for about three-quarters of every month. Here, I set it up alongside my ZWO Seestar S50, taking photos of the same subjects for the same amount of time so I could directly compare results.
I also tried it in EQ mode, in Solar mode, in General mode for a bit of nature photography and spent many hours processing the photos it produced in all modes.
Read the full article here
