[Martin Pugh]

Earlier post edited following more clarification from QHY.

Hi.

thought I would add some more information that I gleaned over the weekend from Dr Qiu at QHY direct. As a relatively new CMOS user, I wasn't aware of this, and if you are reading the spec on the QHY website you may be misled.

So, bin 2x2, does not yield 18bit output as it states on the website. This is under development however, so if you use the on-chip binning function it outputs 12bit, so you need to do it through the driver which will then output 16bits. Of course, this is ONLY relevant to the mono camera. You cannot bin 2x2 the colour camera, hence you have to acquire data unbinned and do software binning thereafter. I have been toying with this over the weekend and I am yet to see any improvement in SNR. I find it quite interesting in the Maxim DL help file that after using the Bin 2x2 command, you should rescale the image by a factor of 4 in pixel math. Whereas in PI, you only have the option of average, median, min, max in IntegerResample, which outputs an identical ADU value to the unbinned image.

Martin