Kodak specs do not require a gradual warming up and cooling down.
This topic has been talked about a lot as Apogee cameras do this.
The argument for gradual cooling and warming is to reduce thermal shock presumably to prevent a sensor from cracking or failure over time.
I have yet to hear of anyone's sensor cracking or failing from thermal shock so its somewhat of a myth.
If you are happy to put up with the delays for cooldown and warmup then that is not a problem and perhaps there is some subtle degradation that can occur from rapid cooldown and warmup.
Richard Crisp who is a semi conductor engineer has talked about this at length and could see no justification for it. His has said that silicone chips are actually extremely tough and hard.
I had an Apogee U16M camera for a few years. I liked the camera in all respects except this point. It would take over half an hour to cool off. Plus if the camera was interrupted once cooled it would take around half an hour or longer to warm up then another half an hour or longer to cool down again.
This used to catch me out doing dusk flats. I would go out to my observatory and didn't leave enough time for the slow cooldown and I would miss the opportunity to do flats often.
One time at 2am the generator ran out of fuel so I refuelled it and then the camera wanted to warm up slowly and then recool slowly. It was over an hour. OMG.
Thank you Greg for explaining that. I know that the manual for my QSI states that I can safely unplug the camera when it is cooled down to whether temperature it has been set. I just thought that rapid temperature changes may cause some extra degradation of the CCD- clearly I have been too cautious.
Nevertheless, in SGP you can set cooling down/warming up time to whatever length you desire; I usually set it to 5 minutes so it does not take too long and is more gradual than simply turning off cooling. BTW my camera's cooling is amazingly efficient; it takes about 3 minutes to bring the temperature of the CCD down by 40 degrees.