Quote Originally Posted by Anbesol
What is everybody's obsession with high ISO grain, it is almost as if it were the top benchmark to measure how good a camera is. Whenever a new camera is announced, consumers flood message boards and blogs and comment sections with high ISO query, the hubub is all about the high ISO. What happened to color renditioning, dynamic range, aliasing, color temperature management, etc? And these factors play a role across the entire ISO spectrum anyway.

I think all of us here can agree that ISO 100-400 is ideal when you can get it, and no matter how great a cameras high ISO ability is - light permitting 100-400 will always be the better option.

This rant was sort of sparked by my witnessing another debate at another forum, where cameras were being compared and the benchmark was pixel peeping 3200 ISO image grain at 100% crop. How absurd is it that we can become such compulsive nit-pickers, and completely forget the hundreds of other aspects and benchmarks that cameras can be measured by?

Am I alone in this frustration?
Nope you are not alone!

The camera makers are greatly to blame based on their advertising and marketing decisions. Very good higher ISO images can be made and of course it is not as easy as just turning up the dial.

Advertisements starting appearing that showed a certain brand of cameras results compared to another brand of cameras results, O.K. Nikon vs Canon and one was nice bright action photo and the other was a dark blurred image. It wasn't really a fair comparison and the dark blurred image disappeared, but enough people had seen it.

Of course that the images were taken by professional sports photographers under very specific conditions, so on and so forth, wasn't the message. It was, High ISO saves the day.

Seems as if people want to shoot in the dark and get daylight quality for one issue. The second is attempting to use second rate glass and technique with no flash or other added light source to get what is at best, in some cases, a snapshot.

That having been said the current group of high ISO performers does about as well at 1600 ISO as the first go around of digital cameras with variable ISO did much above 200 or so if not properly exposed. Also the achievement is often at other image expense due to the in camera processing, i.e. Sony by their own admission.

With a little bit of work, a very fine image can be made at high ISO settings. If not post processed, yes it may display some noise. The problem may be that people have too many tools at their disposal that are not being used as engineered or intended to get the result they want or think they should get.

I'm amazed on the other hand at how much difference their is between higher ISO performance in even entry level DSLR's today in late 2009 and the first professional DSLR's. Of course today's cameras benefit from much better in camera processing, newer sensors, and more experienced users.

High ISO is the Holy Grail of the moment. Give everybody six months and there will be a new fixation.