[jprime84]

Originally Posted by AlphaBjerke

While shooting the other day, I met a fellow shutterbug who told me that with the higher end lenses--for instance, the Canon L Series--you can shoot at a lower ISO because more light gets through the better glass. (And Mike, if you joined DPS like I suggested, I don't doubt you, but someone else didn't go for what you said so I'm just throwing it out there)

Specifically, he had an expensive lens and I had a kit lens. We were both shooting at the same aperture and the same shutter speed, but he was able to shoot at 200 ISO when I had to shoot at 400 to get the same settings.

What do you folks know about this. It sounds logical to me!

- First off, your friend's reasoning is certainly bogus

- Assuming that you were both manually manipulating the aperture and shutter speeds while leaving the ISO to "auto," you may have had another setting that was different that could affect ISO such as the metering mode (spot, center biased, evaluative, etc).

If you decided to say that every setting was the same, it can still come down to software. Software in the Canon determines what ISO it wants to use given a set of variables. Separate software in the Sony does the same thing, but its unlikely they were written by the same people.


Probably the most confusing part of your statement, is your wording is unclear. When you say that "We were both shooting at the same aperture and the same shutter speed" do you mean you both manually made input those settings?

"he was able to shoot at 200 ISO when I had to shoot at 400 to get the same settings"
This makes it sound like ISO was the manual setting, and the others were automatic? You can set any of these settings, including ISO, to whatever you want.

Only real way to find out what was up was to get EXIF data