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Old 11-07-2014, 07:53 PM
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uwahl (Ulrich)
Mr Avalot To'Learn

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Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Newcastle, Australia
Posts: 159
Binning and read noise

I have been at this for a very short time so limited experience but my impressions from listening and reading are as follows:-

1 The major reasons to bin or not are driven by seeing, focal length, pixel size and the need to avoid under or over sampling.

2 When a CCD is read the charge in each pixel or group of pixels if binned is shifted to the output registers and then read. It is at this point that read noise is introduced. Therefore whether you read 1x1, 2x2 or 3x3 pixels you only introduce read noise once. This means that your signal to noise ratio increases if you on chip bin and that's good.

3 Binning however sacrifices resolution and that may be not so good.

4 There are other sources of noise (eg dark current) but I am under the impression these are not affected by binning

Can anyone tell me if I have that approximately right and if not where my thinking is off track.

There have been suggestions that the 8300 chip suffers from extra read noise above that experienced when not binning if on chip binning occurs. I would be grateful if anyone can explain how this happens and better still put some sort of value on it. I am afraid I am one of those irritating nerdy types who just HAS to know how things work
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