Continuing with my introspection on camera features brought about my the return of my old film body last week, how about a post for all those boring, tedious technical aspects of DSLRs that so many of us are already taking for granted and not fully appreciating in our clamor for ever-new and bigger features:

ISO 800+. Let’s set all arguments about high ISO noise and the sensor format wars aside for a moment. Show of hands, ten years ago, who was shooting above ISO 400? How abut ISO 800? By the time this line of thinking gets to ISO 3200, heck, we barely even stock ISO 3200 film. While it’s nice to have increasingly better high ISO performance, let’s not forget to remember that for most practical purposes anything above ISO 800 is a gift given to us by digital anyway, regardless of its chroma noise.

High Speed Flash Sync. I just recently got my Canon AE-1 Program back form a friend who had been borrowing it. As I was looking it over I saw the familiar old lightning bolt next to the 60 on the shutter dial. I think about a thread I read recently on a forum, where some user was livid that the new wave of Nikon digital cameras How dare Nikon only give the D700 a maximum flash sync of 1/250 of a second with a focal plane shutter? My E-3 can sync between 1/30 and 1/250 of a second. It may not be perfect for every need, but boy, it’s certainly more versatile than that old lightning bolt.

Image Stabilization. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s starting to get where a lot of us take for granted what I’d consider the biggest aid to photographers since auto-focus (at least for convenience). I don’t care how it’s implemented, IS like Canon lenses, Nikon lenses’ VR, Panasonic’s Mega OIS, Olympus’ in-body IS, Sony’s SuperSteady Shot Included (which wins points for the most marketing-speak branded term), Pentax’s Shake Reduction (winning the award for most pertinently named), etc.. The ability to shoot static scenes up to 5 stops slower than the conventional 1/x rules tells me I can is a serious advantage which has become almost as common as shutters in the digital age. According the the old rule, (modified by taking into account crop factor) my dear 50-200mm (100-400mm equiv) should need at least 1/400 second, but I’ll frequently use it down to 1/60 thanks to IS.

White Balance. OK, I understand it’s a popular pastime on some sites to complain about how mediocre the auto white balance feature on most cameras (which I find a bit unfair, if you pay attention you never actually see the world as being totally white). But, the way I see it, we have it at all now. When I was learning photography, I was basically told I could buy tungsten or daylight balanced film. Then, I had to remember which one I had loaded at any given time. Later, I learned about color-correcting filters, which brings white-balance options up to a dozen or so. But, now we have cameras that will attempt to figure it out for us, give us a half dozen presets, and typically even let us dial it in in ridiculously precise steps ourselves. And we can change it by shot!

Sorry, I was getting a little too excited about white balance there. Ah, *ahem*, right. Next time: Stuff!