I have a lot of experience with both ZWO and Dwarflab’s smart telescopes, going right back to the beginning. A couple of years ago I borrowed a friend’s SeeStar S50, and the quality of the data in its images far exceeded anything I’d seen from a smart telescope before—I was genuinely impressed.
But at the time the app was underdeveloped and didn’t let you take full advantage of the hardware, and the hardware itself was a little limited too, especially the S50’s camera itself. Around the same time, I picked up a Dwarf 2 from Dwarflab. It too showed promise, but like the early SeeStar S50, neither the app nor the hardware was really up to the standard of a serious astrophotography telescope.
In early 2026, Dwarflab and ZWO released the Dwarf Mini and SeeStar S30 Pro, respectively, and I was fortunate enough to receive both from the manufacturers. Both of these telescopes are excellent and provide images that are close to what a traditional astrophotography setup costing several times as much can achieve, at a fraction of the cost and complexity of operation. I can use these telescopes without even staying outside if I so choose, and setting them up at a dark sky site is more or less an afterthought—put it down, open the app, (optionally) polar align, and it’s ready to go.
For anyone getting started in deep-sky astrophotography or smart telescopes, the SeeStar S30 Pro and the Dwarf Mini both offer tremendous value, and I recommend them both—even as someone who spends most of my time looking through an eyepiece. This article breaks down how the two compare and which one is the better buy for you.
| Scope | Resolution (Px) | Wide-Angle Lens/Sensor | Pixel size (main sensor) | Quantum efficiency | Max Exposure | FOV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dwarf Mini | 1936 × 1100 (2.1 MP) (2K) | 50 x 40° 6.7mm focal length OMNIVISION OV02K10 | 2.9 μm 4 arcsec/px | 91% | 180s | 2.46° x 1.2° |
| SeeStar S30 Pro | 3840 × 2160 (8.29 MP) (4K) | 63° x 35° 7mm focal length Sony IMX586 | 2.9 μm 4 arcsec/px | 91% | 60s | 3.99° x 2.24° |
Bottom Line
Both the SeeStar S30 Pro and Dwarf Mini are amazing telescopes. It really just comes down to price.
If you can afford the S30 Pro and don’t mind any potential waiting for more stock to arrive, I’d probably get the S30 Pro. The Dwarf Mini’s ability to take longer individual exposures is nice—but unless you have dark skies, the longer subs don’t matter as much as the wider field of view of the S30 Pro.
However, if you want something lightweight and more affordable, get the Dwarf Mini. Dwarf Mini’s lower weight and lesser tripod requirements matter a lot if you intend to frequently carry it around, and you can learn the basics of imaging and processing with one just like you would with the SeeStar S30 Pro.
You can also always start with the Dwarf Mini now and upgrade to the S30 Pro later; it’s even possible to combine exposures from the two telescopes in post-processing and get a better image than either can produce solo.
Just how similar is the hardware?
The SeeStar S30 Pro and the Dwarf Mini are very similar telescopes in terms of their optics and sensors.
Both have 30mm of aperture, and their sensors are similar too: the IMX662 in the Dwarf Mini is essentially a crop of the IMX585 in the S30 Pro. Both are uncooled color CMOS sensors with the same quantum efficiency, read noise, and pixel size.
Both are apochromatic triplet refractors, not the most expensive glass but nice enough, showing just a touch of chromatic aberration on the brightest stars.
Overall, both smart telescopes are very sharp, holding up to the tolerances of much larger and more expensive instruments; image quality isn’t any worse than what you’d get from a cheap 80mm apo refractor, just in a much smaller package. Both being 30mm, the S30 Pro is slightly slower than the Dwarf, with a 160mm focal length putting it at roughly f/5.3 versus the Dwarf at 150mm and f/5.
The main difference between these telescopes’ images, besides the apps themselves and all they dictate, is the field of view of both the main and wide-angle sensors, which are both much narrower in the Dwarf. The S30 Pro’s IMX585 sensor has an area 4 times that of the Dwarf Mini’s IMX662 sensor, so the result is that the S30 Pro has a field of 3.99 x 2.24 degrees versus the Dwarf Mini’s 2.46 x 1.2 degree field.
The Dwarf Mini can roughly match the S30 Pro’s field of view by using mosaic mode, but this, of course, means you need ~4x the exposure with the Dwarf Mini to match the S30 Pro’s level of detail on wide targets.
Dwarf Mini can only fit part of the NGC 2671 complex in its native field of view. Compare that to the S30 Pro. Both taken with 30-second frames, Bortle 1 skies. 1h 10min with S30 Pro, 3h 10min with Dwarf Mini. This object is very low in the sky for me, only about 15 degrees up at its highest to the south.
Where the Dwarf Mini Wins
- Longer maximum exposures. The Dwarf Mini can technically take up to three-minute exposures, though in practice two minutes is the realistic limit. The SeeStar S30 Pro can technically take individual exposures up to 1 minute but is more consistent if you keep it down to 30-second frames.
- Much lighter. The Dwarf Mini weighs roughly half what the SeeStar does. Both are light enough to carry in a backpack, but hiking a few miles into the mountains with the S30 Pro was not my favorite experience. On a separate trip I forgot the Dwarf was in my backpack entirely.
- Works with smaller tripods. Being lighter and having a 1/4”-20 socket on the bottom, the Dwarf Mini works with much smaller and more common tripod heads. The S30 Pro needs a 3/8” stud and, weighing more, demands a beefier tripod and head.
- Easier polar alignment. The Dwarflab app’s polar alignment routine is simply easier than the SeeStar’s—fewer steps and a more thorough process.
- Manual pointing. You can grab the Dwarf Mini and move it by hand to aim it at objects, day or night. You can’t do that with the SeeStar—and, honestly, I’m not sure you can with any other smart telescope either without causing damage.
- Easier file transfer. The S30 Pro has trouble when it comes to getting a Windows PC to recognize it; it works fine with my Mac, though. The Dwarf Mini has no such problems, and its smaller files also make transfer and processing simpler/faster.
- Better star and satellite trail rejection. The Dwarf Mini is much better at automatically rejecting frames with trailed stars and satellite streaks. The S30 Pro is bad at this and will often stack frames with blurry stars or even leave satellite streaks in the final image, forcing you to re-stack the image.
- Better in-app denoising/post-processing. The Dwarf Mini’s in-app Stellar Studio denoising is the stronger of the two if you really must use the app instead of dedicated software on your computer for processing.
- Cheaper. As of the time of writing, from most retailers, the Dwarf Mini is a bit over half the price of the SeeStar S30 Pro.
Where the SeeStar S30 Pro Wins
- Better wide-angle lens. The S30 Pro’s wide-angle lens has a wider field of view (63° vs. 50° on the long axis) and is sharper than the Dwarf Mini’s equivalent, with the same resolution as the S30’s main sensor. It’s also better set up for automatic time-lapses, star trails, and stacked Milky Way exposures, with better internal processing for all of that than the Dwarflab app currently offers—though that could change.
- Much wider field of view. The S30 Pro’s larger IMX585 sensor gives it basically the equivalent of 3 Dwarf Mini frames stacked on top of each other vertically.
- Better alt-az stacking. If you’re using the telescope in alt-azimuth mode, the S30 Pro is significantly better at stacking sharp images than the Dwarf Mini—though both scopes still show field rotation artifacts in alt-az mode, so I’d use equatorial mode on either one anyway.
- Remote control. The S30 Pro’s “station mode” allows for remote operation of the telescope over a WiFi network, and it can even be used with software like NINA in lieu of the SeeStar app itself.
- Less sensor noise. The Dwarf Mini’s smaller housing and more use of metal parts turn it into an oven, with the sensor getting considerably warm on its own—exacerbated by the often-high nighttime temperatures I experience in Arizona. The S30 Pro’s greater internal volume and mostly plastic body mean it is far less susceptible to warming up the sensor.
- Less confusing file formatting. While this is a minor attribute, I like that my SeeStar’s images are automatically labeled with the total and individual exposure times. I always have to boot up my Dwarf and check the image details on my phone to confirm the exposure details.
- Longer battery life. The Dwarf Mini’s battery lasts me around 4 hours. The S30 Pro can get around 8 hours on a typical evening. I usually plug these scopes into an external power source anyway, but if I’m going hiking or don’t have much room when carpooling to a dark sky site, this is worth taking note of.
- Includes a tripod. The S30 Pro comes with a built-in miniature tripod. The Dwarf Mini doesn’t include any tripod at all, though you can just set it on the ground for alt-az mode if needed. Both telescopes need a tripod head or wedge to be used in an equatorial configuration, however.
- Faster to switch targets. The SeeStar app makes it easier to rapidly switch between modes and objects. The Dwarf Lab app is fairly clunky in that respect.
- Bigger and more efficient mosaics. The Dwarf has to use mosaic mode just to match the S30 Pro’s field of view; the S30 Pro can take vastly larger mosaics of objects like the Veil Nebula.
My Experience with the SeeStar S30 Pro and Dwarf Mini
I received the Dwarf Mini in February 2026, followed by the S30 Pro a month later. I’ve imaged with both extensively from my Bortle 5 backyard in Tucson, Arizona, as well as from many dark-sky locations, including:
- Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (Bortle 1)
- Chiricahua Wilderness/Rustler Park (Bortle 1)
- Mount Graham (Bortle 1)
- Oracle State Park (Bortle 3)
- Whipple Observatory (Bortle 3)
- Ironwood Forest National Monument (Bortle 3)
- Saguaro National Park (Bortle 4)
In total, I’ve racked up dozens of images with both telescopes over the spring of 2026, and I’m only just getting started. Most of my processing is done with the free, open-source tool Siril. I have PixInsight available, but that software costs about as much as an entire Dwarf Mini, and honestly, the results aren’t much different from Siril. Either program, however, is a must-have for post-processing images with these smart telescopes. The live-stacked image previews you’ll see on your phone/tablet are just a fraction of what the data can reveal with proper post-processing.
Once I got the S30 Pro, I found myself wanting to use the Dwarf Mini less. For one, Dwarf Mini’s battery doesn’t last very long, so when I want to image unexpectedly in the middle of the night or bring it on a trip with friends, I usually bring the S30 Pro since I don’t need to worry about an external power bank as much.
Of course, for wide-angle landscape shots, you can always find me using the S30 Pro, as Dwarflab simply hasn’t added the capabilities to the app to match the SeeStar in this regard. However, I have still enjoyed the Dwarf Mini, and I can use it to complement the SeeStar when imaging smaller targets.
How They Stack Up in Practice
Once you set the field of view and wide-angle lens differences aside, the actual performance of the Dwarf Mini and SeeStar S30 Pro is very close.
The dual-band filters in both scopes perform about the same for improving nebula contrast. Color balancing on both is similarly good—not perfect, but close. Assuming the same sub-exposure length, the two are pretty similar, both for capturing detail other than the tendency for the Dwarf Mini to have slightly more noise from internal heat on the sensor.
For small targets, where you’re not using the whole field of view, the Dwarf Mini has a slight edge purely because of its better tracking, allowing for longer individual exposures of 1-2 minutes, instead of just 30 seconds per frame. But it simply can’t do as good of a job on larger targets.
Wide-Angle Lens, Star Trails, & Nightscapes
The Dwarf Mini only recently (in May 2026) received software updates allowing it to actually track and stack images of the Milky Way. It is hardly comparable in quality to the S30 Pro, unfortunately. In addition to the resolution being roughly halved, Dwarf Mini’s wide-angle sensor is prone to some rather odd artifacts regardless of whether it’s in equatorial or alt-azimuth mode. You can really see the difference between the Dwarf and the S30 Pro’s wide-angle lenses in the below images of the Milky Way.
1 hour of 30-second images of the Milky Way from my backyard. The Dwarf Mini’s wide-angle lens suffers from some extreme gradients, and even when re-stacking the frames individually from within Siril, I’m unable to get them out. Both of these images are cropped from the original size.
Currently, the Dwarflab app also has no option to take timelapse videos or star trails. Yes, you could make your own using the raw data from the wide-angle lens, but stretching and evenly processing every individual frame for a timelapse is exhausting and requires you to have access to a good PC. In contrast, I usually am texting my friends my S30 Pro’s timelapse videos before I’m even done packing up, since they don’t even need much, if any, post-processing.
The S30 Pro’s “Freeze ground” feature also allows me to take nightscapes above terrestrial features without nearly as much DIY post-processing, and there’s a timelapse mode—both of which the Dwarf Mini currently doesn’t have any equivalent to whatsoever.
Combining Data From Both Telescopes
The S30 Pro has the same size pixels and aperture as the Dwarf Mini, with only a 10mm longer focal length. As such, you can combine data from the two telescopes without issues. If you already have a Dwarf Mini and have decided to upgrade to the S30 Pro, for instance, this is really nice since you can get even more exposure time on your target in one night.
If you use mosaic mode, the Dwarf has roughly the same field of view as the S30 Pro’s standard size framing, or you can just crop down your SeeStar data to the size of the Dwarf Mini’s field of view for smaller targets. If one telescope is having issues with blowing out fine detail, glare, or simply blurry stars for part of the frame, combining data is a good way to compensate.
To combine the data from the two telescopes smoothly, I use plate solving in Siril so the software knows the different focal lengths of the two telescopes, then stack the data from each instrument into a single image. You may have to change the clipping and rejection settings to get optimal stars and minimal noise, and there will certainly be some cropping needed, but once you get the hang of it, it’s really not much more work than processing images from a single instrument.
Alternative Recommendations
The S30 Pro and Dwarf Mini aren’t the only game in town when it comes to smart telescopes.
The SeeStar S30 Pro succeeds the regular S30, which has the same IMX662 sensor as the Dwarf Mini and otherwise performs pretty similarly. And the Dwarf 3 has some features the Mini lacks, such as video mode and slightly smaller pixels, but it’s otherwise pretty similar in performance—I would really recommend the Dwarf Mini over the 3, and if you’re looking to spend that much on a smart scope, you might as well go further and get a SeeStar S30 Pro.
What about 50mm smart telescopes? The original ZWO SeeStar S50 (in any case now discontinued in the US) hardly has a sensor I’d call state-of-the-art, and the S30 Pro is otherwise leaps and bounds ahead of it apart from the smaller aperture. ZWO says they will release an “S50 Pro” sometime in late 2027, and I’m sure it’ll be an excellent instrument, but that’s a while from now.
The best option if you must have a 50mm aperture smart scope would probably be one of the Vaonis Vespera models. I’ve had the Vespera II previously, and it was great; the Vespera III is an improvement, but of course the price is quite a bit more if you’re just a beginner. Vespera also doesn’t support equatorial mode currently, which somewhat limits its capabilities compared to the Dwarf and SeeStar models.
All in all, for the prices they’re at, the ZWO SeeStar S30 Pro and Dwarf Mini are outstanding, though you certainly do get what you pay for with the Dwarf; I’d recommend them in lieu of a DSLR/star tracker for beginner astrophotography and certainly over any other competing smart telescopes for the time being.