What would you like to see in 2007?

hahaha

Easy for you to say, ya D2x snob, ya.

 

Chris

No! The D2x doesn's handle noise that well above ISO 800... What I meant to say was that I still have that "film" mentality and consider anything above ISO 400 unusable (grainy). Of course I wouldn't say so if I had a 5D, but I never need ISO above 400 anyways...

Dynamic range and good high ISO performance are related. For sunball shots it's often necessary to way underexpose parts of an image to avoid overexposing the sun. The dark parts are brighten in post processing and is effectively shot at high ISO even though the camera setting is ISO 100.

I, for one, would prefer the megapixel wars be replaced with the dynamic range wars. For most cameras with 10MP or higher, adding more pixels will make a very marginal improvement (if any) in the image quality since they are often limited by diffraction and lens aberations. Increasing the dynamic range, on the other hand, would be killer. Unfortunately I think that they actually pretty close to theoretical performance for non-cooled sensor. They could put in a peltier, but that would suck battery life and probably make the camera a lot bigger (and expensive!)

However, having some sort of automatic HDR mechanism which makes rapid multiple exposures would be one way of increasing the dynamic range. The idea of setting ISO independently for R, G, and B is an interesting one, but I think that the hardware for this would be extremely tricky.

Dynamic range and good high ISO performance are related. For sunball shots it's often necessary to way underexpose parts of an image to avoid overexposing the sun. The dark parts are brighten in post processing and is effectively shot at high ISO even though the camera setting is ISO 100.

Herb and others,

As you may know, there have been very nice discussions of ISO and DR on Luminous Landscape forums, e.g., here. LL's look and feel may induce deja vu for wetpixelians....

Chris

Three words: More Dynamic Range

Try the new Fuji S5 Pro. The dynamic range is a big improvement over the Nikon and Canons.

Pete

The idea of setting ISO independently for R, G, and B is an interesting one, but I think that the hardware for this would be extremely tricky.

Actually, I believe video cameras do this already since they (1) need wide white balance range, and (2) heavily compress the resultant data (no RAW!). The problem is that you need to know white balance beforehand which we RAW shooters don't like. The 5D can use higher ISOs without penalty but that's because it could use more than the 12 bits that it has. The question is whether you'd like superior white balance without penalty at 12 bits or you'd rather have all the data all the time through 14 bits. I'd rather have the extra data if I could get it.