Low iso?

[Timothy Jones]

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. My Leica SL has an iso 50 setting and I love it .
It can save the day when I just have the camera and want to shoot a clip .
I Don’t need to have ND or screw on polarizer to carry around. It got me to thinking, that back in the old film days, some of the best films were low iso like 25 Kodachrome . Would it be that hard for chip designers to make low iso as well as high?
It seems like it might be a good workaround built in mechanical camera ND.
Am I wrong?
Thanks,
Tim
www.tjphoto.net

 

[Björn Benckert]

If you want your 800iso camera to be a 50iso camera you add ND 1.2 and go.

But a digital camera does not have a native iso the exposure is always pushed so the question is how much you want to digitally gain your footage. And there is a balance between how much noise you are ok with and how much you want / need to protect your highlights.

 

[Mike P.]

I think there is a problem/limitation between DR distribution and that CMOS sensors capture in linear that needs to get converted to log. You can't get maximum DR in the converted log images when you limit the sensor to those lower ISOs. Like the low-end stops wouldn't have enough differentiation to be distinguishable from one another and it'd lower overall usable DR.

Admittedly full-blown guesstimating and could be totally wrong.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

I think there is a problem/limitation between DR distribution and that CMOS sensors capture in linear that needs to get converted to log. You can't get maximum DR in the converted log images when you limit the sensor to those lower ISOs. Like the low-end stops wouldn't have enough differentiation to be distinguishable from one another and it'd lower overall usable DR.

Admittedly full-blown guesstimating and could be totally wrong.

What you really mean is that the highlight stops would all be blown out, which also affects DR. It's just that it affects the other end of the DR equation