Note that AFAIK there is no evidence that :
- Lenses and sensors are not "binned" depending on their quality
- The more expensive models could be going through more extensive testing / calibration to ensure their tighter specs
Regarding binning of sensors: would be interesting to get the bad pixel count for E4 vs E8.
The sensor on my E4 looks to have 62 bad pixels, with quite a few near the edges.
What's also interesting to see is the circular pattern in the calibration picture, since no doubt the black body they used is aaaalmost uniform but not quite.
Below are the calibration pic + extracted bad pixels. Notice the banding in the calibration pic. I normalized and truncated to 8-bits, but the banding is also there in the raw 16-bit.
There's also what looks like the correction factor per pixel, all with values between 0x1c and 0x29.
You can find the raw files in /FlashFS/system/maps/ . Those are all FFF type Flir files with raw data. The .gan and .crs is what I used for the bad pixel count etc.