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Puzzled on how to go about picking the best low light digital camera? Well, you aren’t alone. While many people regard low light capabilities as being one of their top priorities, very few actually know what to look for so here is a summary on what you need to look for.

Picking the best low light Point and Shoot

Point and shoots are by far the most popular choice when it comes to digital cameras. They’re easy to use and for the most part inexpensive. However, most of the inexpensive options have terrible low light capabilities. So what do you look for when it comes to a good low light capable point and shoot?

• The highest possible ISO setting- Plain and simple, the ISO setting is the most important factor when it comes to picking a good low light digital. If you are familiar with standard film cameras, the ISO value on a digital camera can be said to be the same as Film Speed on a traditional film camera. The ISO scale is the digital camera’s ability to capture light. The higher the value, the better your low light digital photographs will be without the use of a flash. Think of the value as buckets capturing rain. The more buckets you have in a given area, the closer they are and the more rain they will capture. The same goes for the light capturing sensor on a digital camera. A camera with an ISO value of 6400 will capture a lot more light than one with 800.
• What is a good ISO value?- A good minimum value is about 1600. There are many cameras that fit the bill. Most very affordable and priced in the $100-$200 range.
• Find Cameras with Manual ISO settings- Most inexpensive cameras under $100 suffer from the same flaw. They lack the ability to change ISO settings manually. Many have settings like “Day”, “Night”, “Candle Light”, etc. The problem with these is that you have no way of know what the ISO setting is.  This is done to hide the fact that they are unsuitable for low light images.  Stick to cameras that allow you to select the ISO value directly this way you know exactly what you are getting.
• ISO, no Free Lunch. While higher ISO will allow you to take lower light images, there is no free lunch. Because point and shoots use relatively small image sensors, at higher ISOs noise starts becoming a problem.  While not the worst thing in the world, this means that higher ISO shots should be scaled down in size in order to minimize the noise. If you take a very high ISO shot, it will be nearly impossible to have that image look great at the highest mega pixel setting on the camera. Such shots can also be cleaned up and reduced in size through the use of software. If you absolutely must have low noise, low light images, then the only solution is to step up to more expensive dSLR cameras since they use much larger image sensors.

View Consumer Reports Top Low Light Digital cameras for 2009