It's not just the ISO... it's how useful the ISO is. Check out the reviews on
www.dcresource.com and compare the pictures in low light to any other camera. The ISO 800 of the F30 is the same quality as the ISO 100 or 200 of most other cameras. I've seen other cameras that can do 800 ISO (P&S cameras) but they look like crap. heh
If you don't mind a flash... don't worry about it. But there is nothing on the market right now in a P&S that even comes close to the F30 for low light at high image quality. I've shot useable pictures at 3200 ISO in
pitch blackness where I couldn't even see the target myself. A little grainy, but I cleaned them up and they're still useable. I don't even have the flash turned on anymore. It's permanently set to "suppress flash" so I don't get flash highlight blowouts.
Take that with a grain of salt. If you don't mind using a flash, there are some really nice cameras out there. I just wanted something that could shoot without a flash in low light and still take high quality pictures.
Some samples I took myself:
Bright sunlight, outside in direct sun in the afternoon.
Indoors at night with only one light on, no flash.
Dusk, just after the sun had set. No flash.
Obvious.
Also obvious.
Sunset, in my driveway. No flash.
Here's the kicker. That's a car I have the camera sitting on. It was so dark I couldn't see the end of the car, let alone the yard beyond or the hillside. I could just barely see the glow from the streetlamp at the end of the road (that green glow across the field is from the streetlamp over the hedges and such on the right). No moonlight to speakof since it was overcast as you can see, I was shooting away from the moon anyway. I couldn't see anything... the sky was
black as far as I knew. Was surprised to see the picture when I downloaded it.
Bear in mind that these have all been shrunk down for upload... the images are normally 2800px when I start with them. Other than that, I really haven't touched them up in Photoshop much or at all.
I would check out the site at DCResource. The guy that does the reivews is a professional photographer... and he shoots the same subjects for every camera so you can get a really easy comparison of how each camera handles all sorts of situations. He's very indepth too. Doesn't do every camera, but lots of them are reviewed. I was looking at lots of cameras and that site helped me decide on what I needed.
You could also go to your local camera shop and ask to play with the cameras. I did that too. Just to see what they felt like to use, how easily you could control them, etc. There are lots of good cameras out there right now... there are just a few that stand out from the crowd. I was looking at the Fuji F30, the Panasonic TZ1, and the Canon A620 all for different reasons. The low light and high image quality of the Fuji won me over.
I know.. I sound like a broken record.