Bill Tuthill wrote:
The search tools at Dpreview.com or Steves-Digicams or Imaging-Resource
aren't helping me find an appropriate camera.

I want something to replace a film P&S camera loaded with 800 speed film
that can be used in dark canyons to record sports action (kayaking).

Although the Canon CMOS models and Sony-CCD-based DSLRs (Nikon Pentax K-M)
produce excellent results at ISO 1600 and good results up to ISO 6400,
I have not found a compact digicam model that is much good above ISO 200.
Even the $1800 Leica Digilux 2 is visibly soft at ISO 400 (calling it a
"compact" would be a misnomer however).

Am I missing something? Is there a compact digicam that produces even
remotely acceptable results at ISO 800-1600? I'm tired of blurry pictures
from camera shake and subject movement.


The responses so far are an indicator of the state of
the technology, but hoping better will be hoping for
a break in the laws of physics. The high noise on small
sensors is due to photon counting statistics. The small
sensors are dominated by low numbers of photons being collected,
factors of 10 in comparison to DSLRs at the same ISO.
The only way to change that is to get larger sensors
into the P&S cameras, which will probably happen, but slowly.

See:
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail

and in particular:
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/d...ignal.to.noise

I'm putting together a page that compares DSLR versus P&S,
example on jpeg versus tif; I'll use data on this page
for a comparison of the 3 cameras:
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/raw.versus.jpeg1

Pixel size is everything when it comes to signal-to-noise.

Roger