[Shiraz (Ray)]

took two broadband images of the same piece of sky with equal exposures, using 2x2 binning on one and 1x1 binning on the other. tried to measure sky signal on exactly the same region with the following results:

bin1x1 SNR = 12.7 signal = 591

bin2x2 SNR = 25.9 signal = 2347

within the limits of experimental accuracy, the SX H694 implements a pure binning, with no fiddling with gain (there was a minor bias change) and no erosion of SNR. The increase of SNR is 2x and of signal is 4x, which is what would be expected if the binning was perfect.
Both exposures were long enough that read noise was swamped, so I have not investigated any change of read noise with binning - will need to do this with NB data.

The other issue of overload in saturated regions also appears to be a non-event. Stars do not show any obvious signs of blooming artefacts when they saturate in 2x2 binned mode.

I was astounded that the camera performed to the theoretical limit - this gives some confidence in using it as a 1.5mp high QE ABG camera on larger scopes, or in binned mode for gathering colour information when colour resolution is not a major issue.

Thanks for reading. regards Ray