Canon notice who the 300D customers are

The asking price for the camera has been set at $2400 in the US.

With an older camera you may not have a bulb setting for super long exposures but the more decent ones have up to 15 or more seconds. Hot pixels are easily dealt with by taking a dark frame and some cameras handle this for you automatically.

What method do you use to take a dark frame? - Do you simply put the lens cap on and take a photo with exactly the same settings (shutter speed, aperture etc.)?

And what's the easiest way to subtract the dark frame from the original?

I've tried a few techniques for dark frame subtraction, but I always end up with 'remnants' of the noise showing up.

What method do you use to take a dark frame? - Do you simply put the lens cap on and take a photo with exactly the same settings (shutter speed, aperture etc.)?

That's right. Straight after (some do it before) the actual photos so that the temperature is the same.

And what's the easiest way to subtract the dark frame from the original?

A lot of the astro-processing software will do it for you. Typically you take 10 or so dark frames that can be median averaged. This is because successive dark frames can be slightly different in the noise aspect but not necessarily in the hot spot aspect.

Programs like Registack, K3CCDtools and Iris allow you to load in multiple darks and create the median of a stack with which to subtract within the program.

Alternatively you can subtract a dark from a photo in a graphics package like PSP9 or PS CS with the image arithmetic function.

I've tried a few techniques for dark frame subtraction, but I always end up with 'remnants' of the noise showing up.

Sounds like you are just using one dark frame. A stack of them will average out the noise. And, of course, a stack of the photos will increase the signal to noise ratio.

The asking price for the camera has been set at $2400 in the US.

Well thats a bit pointless.
You can buy 2 300D cameras, one normal and one modified for that price !

There's a lot of excitement in the States over this, it's still quite pricey though in my opinion, but it's good to see that canon have coped on to this...maybe this will be the trend in the future, one camera model as standard, and one for astrophotography

Keith..

With the current rate of the Dollar to Sterling. It's about the same price as the EOS300D when it was launched. Hopefully, like that camera, Amazon et al might be selling it more cheaply next year.

Of course, by then, the EOS300D will be so cheap we will be kicking ourselves.