My feeling is we're chasing our tail.
Yes high iso is great for photojournalists some wedding photographers and sports guys, but overall, it's just a lot of smoothing and detail killing to the point I don't think any camera does more than 1000 iso and holds everything and if it does it becomes rather generic and digital looking.
These are three images. Two from the past (one just retouched).
the first is from an Aptus 22 and a Contax, window light no retouching, small jpeg out of camera raw just color corrected in photoshop, no layers, no masking.
The second from a 12mpx Canon 1ds, cropped to about 2/3's of the frame. We just retouched it for a reference video and decided to work in high resolution.
This was shot flash and obviously has intense retouching, but very little added to the look other than the beauty look of face and hair and wardrobe.
The third recently shot with the Leica S2 see see d version, using hmi's I think at 320 iso, but maybe 640 I don't remember.
It has layers of working shadows, some clean up and obviously masking the background to black.
Other than that very little skin or face retouching.
Now to me, as I went down the line in cameras, from 1ds, 2, 3 and x, Nikon D3, Leica's S2 and M8, and my 30+ and 21+ phase backs, I've noticed how the cmos cameras get newer, the less film like look, the more digtial or plastic look of the image and honestly I think rather generic.
But that's just one person's opinion but these samples represent cameras from 10, 7, and 3 years old and they all work close to the same.
I don't think it's always cmos vs. ccd, I just think the makers get caught up in megapixels and ultra high iso and something changes in the look and the makers are no longer trying to emulate film, they're trying to make smooth, broad lattitude images.
I personally think a ccd file works deeper, more film like, more texture, but I also use ccd cameras at higher isos, never under 200 iso, usually at 320 to 640/800.
IMO
BC