Uselessly high megapixels counts aren't the only way camera makers try to fool consumers.
DP Review has a nice summary of the ISO shuffle. Just a year or so ago, light sensitivity over ISO 400 was rare in consumer digicams. Now manufacturers are touting ratings of 1,600 or higher.
Yet there's seldom any explanation of what kind of images you can expect at such settings. The hard facts of life and physics essentially mean that a high-resolution image captured at high ISO setting in a point-and-shoot camera will either have so much noise or such brutal noise suppression that you'll never want to look at it bigger than passport size.
Compact Camera High ISO modes: Separating the facts from the hype [DP Review]
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