Photon statistics in the macroscopic realm measured without photon counters

In a macroscopic realm, in which photons are too many to be counted by any photon-counting detector, photon statistics can be measured by using detectors simply endowed with linear response. We insert one of such detectors in a conventional photon-counting apparatus, which returns a voltage every time the detector responds to light by generating a number of elementary charges via its primary photodetection process. We only assume that, when a single charge is photogenerated, the probability density of the voltages is a distribution that is narrow with respect to its mean value. Under this hypothesis the output voltages can be suitably binned so that their probability distribution is the same as that of the photogenerated charges, that is, of the detected photons.