Just to define my needs and wants a little more, these are some typical shots that I struggle with, using my current old school film camera. These were taken last weekend at my son's dance class performance, quickly printed tonight, and scanned at 600 dpi on my home multi-function printer. i think the scanning has reduced some of the shadow detail.
First shot. Film, HP5+, pushed 2 stops to 1600 ISO, 1/60 sec, f1.4, 85 mm lens. Scene is dark, figures are moving. I struggle with manual focusing, fast enough shutter speed (1/60 doesn't work great for dancers in motion), and noise (someone got shirty about my shutter/drive). My next digital camera needs to autofocus on the face of the dancer in the background, instead of on the foreground dancer; if I have to tell it what to do, it has to be something I can do very fast, this shot existed for a fraction of a second. It doesn't need high resolution, but needs to handle shadows well. Its lens needs to have big aperture for shallow DOF, the only way this shot works is because the foreground danger is out of focus.
Here is another picture from the performance. That's my son by the way. Same ISO and shutter speed as the first shot, but using a 55 mm lens at, I think, f1.8. Also a dark scene. Here I my focus wasn't so great, and the shot doesn't need shallow DOF. I did want a slow shutter speed (not that I had any choice given the lighting) because I was hoping for faces sharp and arms blurred by motion, didn't really get that because timing was off. So my future digital camera needs to be able to focus very accurately on the face, to have the ISO flexibility to allow a smaller aperture (like f5.6) and a slower shutter speed (like 1/30). I could print this shot to get more shadow detail if i wanted to, the digital camera should allow that too.
A third shot from the performance. 1600 ISO, 1/60, f1.4, 55 mm. I figure most any digital camera should handle this easily. The dancers were briefly stationary.
