We theoretically demonstrate that detectors endowed with internal gain and operated in regimes in which they do not necessarily behave as photon-counters, but still ensure linear input/output responses, can allow a self-consistent characterization of
the statistics of the number of detected photons without need of knowing their gain. We present experiments performed with a photo-emissive hybrid detector on a number of classical fields endowed with non-trivial statistics and show that the method works for both microscopic and mesoscopic photon numbers. The obtained detected-photon probability distributions agree with those expected for the photon numbers, which are also reconstructed by an independent method.
