[apgwoz]

With that ISO range, they've effectively eliminated the need for flash on 80%+ of photographs. Obviously, you'd still want flash for fill and studio situations, but sports photographers, and everyone else, even (maybe) concert photographers, can probably get away without! Amazing.

[jarek]

At 1D X's price range, all flash use is strictly on purpose - no one would have used flash on a 1D because it's too dark, it's all for the effects it enables with bouncing and gels and all sorts of expensive gadgetry.

The technology filtering down to consumer level in a couple of years is pretty exciting, though as elithrar noted, the exposure is going to be difficult as it's hard to tell between "dark area you want to see" and "dark area that's the background".

[MrScruff]

At 11 stops up from ISO 100, you're getting to have a great deal of noise at the max ISO I would have thought even at full frame.

[elithrar]

> At 11 stops up from ISO 100, you're getting to have a great deal of noise at the max ISO I would have thought even at full frame.

You'd be surprised how clean some of these things are, especially so if you don't plan on blowing things up big. Plus, with NR software these days, you can easily get usable 12,800 ISO & 25,600 ISO shots if you expose them well.

The real trick to shooting in low-light is nailing the exposure; too dark and you'll have dirty highlights, too light and you'll have blotchy, noisy shadows.

[apgwoz]

I'm still using a D70s as my primary camera, but I have to say, when Nikon released it's first camera that supported ISO 6400, they made available full resolution JPGs. You could see a bit of noise if you looked really hard for it, but, it effectively wasn't there. I can only imagine that 25,600 ISO is almost just as good as that. And, quite frankly, it's simply amazing.

[dconway]

Sweet. I've always wanted to look inside people's pores.

[eftpotrm]

I use a Nikon D7000 - it's already quite capable of producing clean files up to 5000, 6400 at a pinch, and of getting perfectly sharp pictures of the cars running in night qualifying at Le Mans earlier this year (admittedly with pretty fast glass). No way I'm pointing a flash at a live race track at night, even if there was a way to make the results look even slightly natural.... So, IMHO, that milestone was crossed some time ago and has been in the high-end consumer space for at least a year now.

What this has primarily done for me is to make non-studio flash for fill and separation, depending on the situation - to control the subject to ambient ratio, in other words. I do still use it for other routine work, but only where it makes the resulting shot easier to take and get a high-quality result.