In Maxim DL, there are six readout modes. Can you please specify how the control of the camera is affected by these selections: Low, Mid, High and the corresponding Stack Pro options? Also, the sub-exposure stacking count, how does that work? Is that a separate control from the Stack Pro control? Thank you, Elizabeth
It is all explained in some detail in the User Manual: https://diffractionlimited.com/downloads/STC-428-OEM_User_Manual.pdf All these settings provide different compromises between EGAIN, noise, and full well depth. Low, Med, and High change the sensor's gain setting. Higher gain provides higher sensitivity and lower noise, but also lower well depth (saturation level). StackPro can be additionally enabled for Low, Med, and High modes. This allows you to dramatically increase the dynamic range, while modestly increasing noise. There's a summary in the main Description section on https://diffractionlimited.com/product/stc-428-oem/ As an example, High gain provides an EGAIN of 1.2 e-/ADU, read noise of only 1.9 e-, and a pretty low saturation point of 5,000 electrons. If you turn on High Gain StackPro mode, and use exposures settings that stack 16 images, then you get the same EGAIN, higher noise at 7.6 e-, and a saturation point of 80,000 electrons. That is better across the board than a single frame from an STF-8300 CCD camera. StackPro automatically adjusts as required based on your exposure time. You set up a target subframe exposure time in the camera settings. Then StackPro will try to achieve that subframe exposure time automatically, and adjust the number of frames and the actual subframe time as needed to achieve your total requested exposure time. This is explained in detail in the manual.
So, this is a new feature compared to the STF-8300. Now, we will experiment with these modes and find the best for our application. Thank you Doug for the explanation and the link, it now makes sense and found the hooks in the dlapi for these controls. Elizabeth
