People are using exposure bracketing to extend the Dynamic Range. This indicates to me that quite a few people think about DR at low ISO, and would like to have more of it without having to resort to exposure bracketing.
Both are relevant aspects of a camera for most users. Lens sharpness is thoroughly reviewed on the net. Autofocus is hard to review objectively, and sadly, we are often only fed the subjective opinion of some reviewer.
-h
I'm not sure why you're questioning my own thoughts about what I'm personally concerned with, and implying they're irrelevant. When I mentioned lens sharpness and autofocus performance, I was saying that these are the
only aspects of performance
I personally am left with when shooting at low ISO, as noise or dynamic range don't concern me down there, because it's already very good. Perhaps read what I said again...No need to nitpick, is there?
Regarding dynamic range at low ISO...I disagree with you. I assume you are heavily into HDR work? People will always exposure bracket to produce HDR images, no matter how big a dynamic range the sensor can achieve. Why? Because they like doing it. They will always want to maximize the number of bits they get in a final HDR image, to ease their own mind,
and to essentially use as a creative toy later. But at the end of the day, what they achieve merely becomes an 8 bit "painterly" cartoon before it gets printed or displayed anywhere as a jpeg. It's still not preserving dynamic range in reality as the eye/brain saw it (or in the future, as some very superior sensor saw it.)
It's artistically impressionistic of reality. In the future, if there are display devices and software that can
accurately display 32 or 48 bits of dynamic range (and they are widely adopted...and people actually enjoy viewing pictures/video on them)...ONLY THEN will maximum sensor dynamic range (at low ISO) be truely a valid issue...in my opinion. This would require a contrast ratio orders of magnitude beyond even the claimed "10 million plus" of OLED displays, etc. It would also require the display device's ability to reproduce luminosity equal to that of the sun, while also being able to reproduce a black that is literally zero light output. I won't hold my breath on this...nor will I quibble over the difference between 16 or 13 bits of dynamic range in RAW files...because mostly I produce prints.
Even if future sensors do achieve 18, 20, 24, 32, or 48 bits of dynamic range...most people will probably be paying $1k on photo software plugins that will squeeze the dynamic range back down so it gets represented on a print. It will still look cartoonish...and the more elements in the picture that actually stretched the dynamic boundaries, the more cartoonish it will look. Sure it can sometimes look great and artistic...but it's still not representing what your eye/brain saw, the way it saw it.