Disclaimer: Wrong calibration factors! See https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8081/40m/13391

The factors were indeed enormously off. The correct table reads:

I did subtract a 'dark' frame from the images, though not in the sense of your point 1, just an exposure of identical duration with the laser turned off. This was mostly to reduce the effect of residual light, but given similar initial conditions would somewhat compensate for the offset that pre-existing charge and electronics noise put on the pixel values. The white field is of course a difference story.

I wonder how close we can get to a white field by putting a thin piece of paper in front of the camera without lenses and illuminate it from the other side. A problem is of course the coherence if we use a laser source... Or we scrap any sort of screen/paper and illuminate directly with a strongly divergent beam? Then there wouldn't be a specular pattern.

I'm not sure I understand your point about the 1.5V/A. Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing I made a crude drawing:

The PD sees plenty of light at all times, and the 1.5V/uW came from a comparative measurement PD<-->Ophir (which took the place of the CCD) while adjusting the power deflected with the AOM, so it doesn't have immediate connection to the conversion gain of silicon in this case. I can't remember the gain setting of the PD, but I believe it was 0dB, 20dB at most.