please save such questions for Your friends, if You want to be treated respectfully, at least read some basic stuff about photography until You decide to ask a question on a forum. If You don't know that ASA and ISO are basically the same, than maybe You should invest in some other hobby. We all here are devoting our times for free, and trust me nothing irritates more, than reading an obvious question that can be answered by simply using wikipedia. Not to mention repeating the same question over and over just because someone was LAZY enough to don't even bother to use the search button.

Link to film speed explanation, as You are too lazy to do it Yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_speed

First of all: the ASA speed of a film is part of the ISO speed. An ASA 100 film would have ISO 100/21° where the 21° is the DIN standard film sensitivity.

Basically the ISO speed of film and DSLRs are comparable. In film days the ISO speed of a film had a direct relationship to the size of the film-grain. An ISO 25 Kodachrome did have a much finer grain than the ISO 200 Kodachrome and most of the time lower ISO did also mean higher resolution.

With digital the relationship of grain and ISO is gone. A 16 MP camera stays 16 MP no matter what ISO you set it to. Of course things like image noise increase when you increase the ISO speed of the sensor.

And the low end? I think if a sensor does not perform visibly better at ISO 50 than it does at ISO 200 why not leave it at ISO 200?

The beauty of film was, that you could use an old camera and still use the latest film. If you do not care about high speed film you can simply use the ISO 50 Velvia (I think this is the Fuji film you referred to) and if you needed some high speed film you could load your camera with an ISO 3200 b&w film and push it to 6400 or higher.

And for your decision: I recommend to try to get a camera for some test shots and have a look at the images. If they are too noisy for your taste then you will need to stay with film. If you need the low ISO for long exposure times to blur motion you can still use ND filters.

Btw: most cameras also offer lower settings than the base ISO, but I never used them. I have to admit that I also was a little worried that the cameras start at ISO 200 as I had the same comparison with film grain. But this is really nothing to worry about. I use a D700 and the image quality at high ISO is so much better than it was with higher speed films.

So don't worry about the high base ISO, get some test shots (if you can't get a camera have a look at the Internet, there are plenty of test images from all types of cameras) and judge yourself.

I agree, it sounds very much like a troll post.

I'll just sit back and see how this pans out.

In consideration for a new DSLR, and looking at the D90 vs D5100 vs D7000, as well as others, most DSLRs bottom out at “100”, with the D90 showing a low end of “200”.

Is ISO the same as ASA was with film? If so, they why don’t digital cameras go LOWER than 100? The best film ever created was Kodachrome 25. There was a ASA 50 film I liked but can’t remember if it was Fuji or Agfa or? If ISA and ASA are roughly the same, I can’t see much use for anything higher than 400. I can’t imagine EVER needing the top end of these things, whether 3200 or 26,500 or however high they go these days. Color will look like crap and I’m not interested in extreme contrast b&w images.