Show me your ISO

If you've ever gone shopping for digital cameras, you'll know that the resolution of the image sensors keeps going up, and keeps being featured prominently on the packaging. Way back on the early days, this was good: you need at least one or two megapixels if you want to print photos at large sizes, and if you do any cropping before printing you'll lose a bit of resolution there. So the jump up from sub-megapixel resolution was a very good thing.

But we've long since passed the point where any more resolution is useful. Take a look at the PowerShot G10 (picked more or less at random). It takes a 14.7 megapixel picture (4416 x 3312 pixels). You could take a shot of a crowd, zoom in to one person's face, blow it up to poster size and it would still look fine. Except that it wouldn't, because by now you're probably past the ability of the optics to focus anyway. Enough with the megapixels already!

I know this isn't a new complaint. Nearly every review at dpreview.com complains about the manufacturers increasing resolution with every new camera, often at the expense of other aspects of image quality. The problem is that camera makers need a big number to put on the box to make the new camera seem better than the last one, so even if the extra resolution is useless for photography, it's good for marketing.

So here's a suggestion for the camera marketers: Put the light sensitivity on the box. In big print. Bigger print than the resolution. It's easy to measure, it gives you a nice big number to stick on there, and it would actually be useful information.

See, when I go shopping for a camera, that's the one thing I want to know: how good is it for low-light shots? I'm not a serious photographer; I just want to take pictures of my kids and vacation spots and the things like that. But I'm tired of having to use the flash in anything less than full daylight. I can guarantee that if could somehow find out which cameras were better in low-light conditions, that would influence my purchasing. But I can't, so it doesn't.