>>3472966>A compact camera is pretty useless as a party/hanging out with friends/spontaneous snapshit camera, without a built-in flash.Do you, personally, use a camera's built-in flash for that?
I'm obviously not saying it's unheard of, just... Personally, I take a hell of a lot of snapshots of my friends in shitty lighting and I never use an on-camera flash for it. Granted, part of that is that my cameras don't usually have on-camera flash, but I never used it when I had it either.
If I'd been a GRII user in that situation, I'd have been using my phone's flash as an off-camera light source while wishing that the GRII had a better sensor and image stabilization and completely ignoring the on-camera pop-up flash. That's what I do when I have a DSLR with me.
f/2.8 at ISO 25600 is enough to get a 1/30th exposure in shitty bar lighting. With stabilization, you can go down to 12800 and 1/15th if your subject is holding even moderately still. If you have any talent at all, you can probably find a slightly brighter spot in the bar for a much better picture (e.g., pic related, which was lit by a pinball machine).
Having a flash is better than not having a flash, but if I had to choose between having no flash and having a flash but having an extra way for dust to get onto my fixed-lens-camera's sensor that I'd never be able to get rid of, having slightly worse battery life, and having a slightly larger camera body, my choice is definitely going to be to say goodbye to the flash. It's not even a little bit of a dealbreaker to me. It's not even something I would have on my radar as a feature I might miss.
