Of course, you can always use the flash. Unfortunately, a flash photo isn’t what you saw with your own eyes. It’s something else, an image that usually features nuclear-bleached faces and cave black background. And it doesn’t work farther than about 10 feet away.

(Those big heavy black S.L.R cameras do much better in low light without the flash, simply because they contain gigantic sensors)

Fujifilm and Sony have each tackled this problem exactly the right way, the hard way: by redesigning the sensor itself, the tiny rectangular chip at the heart of every digital camera.

For years, Fuji has been bragging about the unconventional layout of its sensors. On this chip, the tiny individual pixel sensors (called photosites) aren’t square; they’re hexagonal, arrayed in a honeycomb. That’s supposed to expose more sensor surface to the incoming light.

The new sensor in the F200EXR, though, goes a step further. In what’s called EXR mode, it can merge two adjacent photosites, in effect doubling the light collected at that spot on the sensor.

Of course, this trick also halves the megapixels- you get 6-megapixels shots instead of 12. But amazingly enough, in low light, those 6-megapixels shots are actually sharper and more detailed than the 12-megapixel shots from the same camera.