Quote Originally Posted by barba
There are times where it could be argued that getting a shot, any shot, is better than nothing I suppose.

Yep. The S95 actually has a 'low-light' mode where the ISO ranges from 320 to 12800 - it does so with 2x2 pixel binning meaning you get a 2.5 megapixel image from the 10 megapixel sensor. ISO 12800 on a 4x crop sensor sounds horrible, but in practice it's not as bad as it sounds, because binning increases the signal-to-noise ratio. If Canon were to implement that with a larger sensor, the results would be interesting...