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I agree the argument is not that clear cut.
It depends on the sensor, your seeing, the quality of your optics and the aperture of your scope. Your available imaging time is also a huge factor.
For example the popular KAF8300 does not do proper 2x2 binning as it has a hardware limitation that limits it to a 50% increase not 4X.
I don't know for sure but I imagine if your camera is only 2 megapixels binning makes .5 megapixels and that is pretty low res. So you need enough pixels to make it work also.
I find I get excellent 2x2 binned Ha images from my CDK and 16803. It goes super deep super fast.
But I imagine that same camera on my Honders binned may not be so impressive as 12 inches aperture and F3.8 does not really need 2x2 to capture the signal.
The little Sony sensors I think have a good case for binning at times. Like hers, the 3.69 micron pixels would be too small for most people's scopes and seeing. So binning makes sense and no wonder there is an improvement.
The bottom line is if you have a question about whether its good or not for you is to try it out and observe the differences.
My experience also is that binning 2x2 tends to mean rounder stars for some reason. But they are a bit larger when I flick from 1x1 to 2x2 images of the same object.
2x2 makes sense if you want to do deep and you have enough aperture to retain high resolution.
It also makes sense if your available imaging time is limited due to weather, having to setup each night or clouds/moon. In which case any image is better than no image.
Greg.
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