Until yesterday, I was deathly afraid of the dreaded ISO1600 on my 10D... but last night, after a shoot of some midnight city events, I found the noise on ISO1600 is pretty manageable even without noise reduction.
I found the trick is to get exposure DEAD ON!!! On shots where my exposure was absolute perfect, the noise levels were not bothersome at all... it's not silky smooth like at ISO100 but its the same amount of noise you get from crappy P&S at iso200. Not too shabby by any standards and definately publishable by any magazine or newspaper (not that I would know :P ).
But if the exposure is even a tiny itty bitty bit off, the noise monster will swallow the picture up.
The trick is to fill up the histogram especially the right hand side.
But then we also have noise reduction software to fall back.
These two things combined together is almost as good as IS and big aperture lenses. I find that my 100-300/5.6L is almost passable as an indoor sports lens with ISO 1600/3200.
Yes, the exposure has to be spot on and your images won't suffer to much from noise. With the 1D it is even better to overexpose with 1/3 stop when in doubt.
i was in the same boat as well. i am shooting a dave matthews concert in a couple of weeks and wanted to get some practice shooting a concert in low light conditions.
this past weekend i shot a friends concert which was held under a pavilion outdoors and there was no lighting. it was very dim so in some spots i cranked my iso up to 1600 and thought id try a few shots and i was pretty impressed that they were not as bad as i had thought they would be.
i even ran a proggie called GRAIN SURGERY on them and they came out great...
ISO 3200 not so bad either (although I have run the free version of Neat Image on this). It was by the way a hand held "snap" through my window just to try the 3200 setting.
