QHYIII178C - BW binning 2x2

[aquariusCZ]

The QHYIII178C color camera gives a bin. 2x2 black and white image only.
1 / Camera error?
2 / A natural feature of IMX178?

Is a software solution possible?

Tomas

[admin]

Hi,

It's just the way that qhy seem to run the binning on these cameras. They take the values from a block of 2 x 2 adjacent pixels and combine them – this throws away the colour information. Other manufacturers may implement binning in terms of adding the values from a group of four nearby pixel is all of the same colour – this preserves the colour information but does sacrifice resolution.

In the long run, it doesn't really matter very much – CMOS cameras all do binning in software after the ADC readout - this means that they don't make the same sort of noise improvements that CCD cameras do in binned mode (CCD cameras collect charge from multiple pixels and read it out in a single ADC operation, thereby only incurring one set of read noise). This means that binning really makes very improvement to images from CMOS cameras.

Unless you have issues with the amount of data you need to store then you may as well just capture a full resolution and reduce the resolution at the end of processing if necessary.


Cheers, Robin

[aquariusCZ]

Hi,
thank you for the quick and quality explanation.
Cheers, Tomas