Atik Titan unboxing

[Forum_2014]

Hello,
here are some pictures about unboxing of an Atik Titan
http://www.atik-cameras.com/products/info/atik-titan

In Astroart it can be commanded via the ASCOM driver.
The Titan can be used uncooled, without power supply, since it takes power from USB. Power (12 V - 0.55 A) is used only by the cooler.

This modern 16 bit camera has an extremely low noise ccd and electronics, so I wanted to take a look at the difference between cooled and uncooled 1-seconds exposures, for autoguide. The CCD is a Sony ICX424, 4.8 x 3.6 mm wide.
The test was made for one reason: how much important is cooling for autoguide nowadays?
At room temperature some hot pixels are visible (not so hot, 200 ADUs) and the random noise is only +- 20 ADU.
Click the image for the GIF animation of two frames.

At full cooling, hot pixels have disappeared and random noise drops to +- 15 ADU (you must consider that some of them are readout noise).
The visualization is the same.

I feel that there is not a clear answer, obviously with cooler the noise decreases, but ... working without power supply is so handy for portable telescopes.
The Titan itself is a full ccd camera, optimized for planetary and deepsky imaging. Using it as an autoguider is for "VIP" setups.