There’s plenty of discussion today about ISO invariance and to what degree certain cameras may be ISO invariant. This is a highly technical subject and readers who are interested in exploring this topic in-depth should research it by reading articles on more technically oriented sites. As regular readers know, I’m an experiential/experimental type of photographer, rather than being technically oriented.
In a nutshell, if a camera has perfect ISO invariance (which no camera does) there will not be any penalty in terms of noise when lightening your image in post as compared to originally capturing your image at a higher ISO. This article shares some sample images captured with Nikon 1 V2, V3 and J5 cameras, while doing a simple ISO invariance test. I’d like to thank one of our readers, William Jones, for providing the creative spark for this article.