What is ISO in Cameras?

Video Transcript

"Now a lot of people you hear them talking about ISO and I wanted to be more specific so you can really get an understanding of what this mystery ISO is, because for a long time I had no idea. ISO is often used to refer to the film speed of your camera and specifically it was developed when people were using film. So when you bought your camera , you bought your film for your camera, you were buying 100 speed, 200 speed, 400 speed and it was usually your ISO rating was ISO 100, ISO 200 etc, but ISO really just stands for the group of people that came up with this standardization. It's short for the International Organization of Standardization and that is where the ISO comes from and actually the specific standardization for film is ISO 5800 1987. So as you can guess the 1987 was when they came up with latest updates to the standardization and that was just basically for the film companies and the manufacturers to figure out where there, how sensitive the film that they were making was and if it's rated at 100 then whether you're buying Kodak or Ilford or any other brand of film, ISO 100 is supposed to be around the same amount of light sensitive. So sometimes this may also be called ASA, that was an old acronym for it."