Just a note to say that I have emailed you two images acquired with an old Lodestar and a recently purchased Lodestarx2.
As the cams are uncooled, I kept them in a cold room and then connected each in turn and took darks of 5x 5s duration with each at x1 binning. The noise does look better on the newer Lodestarx2.
I also took the 4th and 2nd frame of the Lodestar sequence and subtracted one from the other and measured the resulting difference image to determine its standard deviation, which was 32.7. Doing the same for the Lodestarx2 gave a standard deviation of 21.1.
I don’t know for a fact that the caps used to block light were equally opaque, but they were the same make. Similarly, the time the cameras had been turned on when each image sequence was taken, probably wasn’t identical. So the CCD may have been at a slightly different temperature as use warmed them up – but it would have been close, a matter of 10s difference at most.
Anyway, hope these are of interest. If anyone else wants copies of the images, then please let me know.
Do let us know what you find about the hotpixels. To me it looks like a factor of 2-3 decrease in the number of hotpixels in the Lodestarx2.