Just like with disk space, where the numbers in KBytes have now 10 digits or more, and bytes as served us by MS Windows are absurd (why do they still do that? 1,304,024,964,096 bytes free, really?) we begin to encounter the same phenomenon with camera ISO sensitivity. 102400 ISO, how would you pronounce that? "Thousand twenty four hundred"? Even worse is 12800, "hundred twenty eight hundred," it is a nightmare. Other languages have similar issues, trust me, I speak 4.
We are in a need of a new unit of measure, and that should be an action embraced by the entire camera industry.
How about a simple pruning of "hundred" into a "HISO," hundred ISO, for lack of a better (or more correct) suggestion, with a decimal dot and one or two positions behind comma?
With that we would have 1H std. in a typical Canon for 100 ISO, 2H in several Nikon's incl. mine D300. Velvia 50 ISO would be 0.5H, and the above 12800 is now 128H, easier to pronounce, not to talk about the display space! Nikon's record setting 1024 H is now manageable as well, and it will take a while to jump over 8192H into a 5-digit realm... A more "revolutionary" idea would to revert to the old logarithmic DIN scale.
What is your opinion?
Thomas