It looks like your mind is made up, but I will throw in my two cents because I was in the same boat as you a few months ago, and got to a point where the technical details started drowning me.
My sincere suggestion: Please get an entry level budget DSLR unless you want to do street photography. Like you, I wanted to take good low light photographs, and the only combination that works at this price point is an entry level DSLR with a bright (f1.8 or below) prime lens. In my case, I bought the
Canon EOS 1000D which was on sale in Bangalore for about 23k. I later bought the
f1.8 50mm prime lens for $100 from Amazon, bringing my total cost to under 30k.
I have got more joy and value out of this combo that I ever got from the couple of P&S I previously had. Why? The DSLR has enough dedicated buttons in the back that I can do trial and error and tweak settings in manual mode very easily. No, I haven't read any technical books and have only a smattering knowledge of photography fundamentals. But it doesn't matter. There are buttons to be pressed and dials to be turned, and the picture quality changes dramatically with different combinations of these settings. Plus, a DSLR has a large enough sensor which can be combined with a cheap prime lens to take better photographs than you would probably have ever taken.
After I got my DSLR and started playing around with it, it took me a few minutes to figure out how to get to the manual mode, and a few more minutes to figure out the various other buttons and dials like ISO, white balance, f-stop, and aperture speed. Most importantly, I figured out how to turn off the flash. After an hour of taking 30-40 shots of a plate of food with different trial and error settings, and with only a bulb providing lighting, I was finally able to take a good photograph
without flash that looked like I had taken it in bright daylight. I cannot describe the sheer joy I felt at that moment. It felt like something I created with my own hands, not just pointing the camera at something and clicking a button. I pestered my wife to praise my photograph so many times that she thought I was going bananas (I was).
Sorry, I will never ever go back to a P&S again, and I don't see the point of buying a "prosumer" camera that costs as much as an entry level DSLR but doesn't allow us to change lenses or give full manual control. Then, it just becomes a tool or a utility, not something we can derive pleasure out of. Yes, many prosumer cameras come with extensive manual controls and some have great lenses but it still doesn't let us change the lenses and still has a small sensor which shuts the door on low light photography.
For example, in my case, the transformative moment was when I bought the prime lens. It was cheap enough that I was able to buy it on a whim, and the improved low light performance it gave was like night and day (pun unintended). Most superzoom bridge cameras or even most superzoom DSLR lenses such as the Canon 55-250 or 75-300 are great value for money ($200-$300) but also have other drawbacks that people overlook, like lack of dedicated buttons, and poor f-stop performance at both ends of the zoom which means that it lets in very little light so that it can zoom better. This may be perfectly okay for say wildlife photography in bright daylight but it won't work for me. Or at least, with my limited knowledge, I don't know how to make it work for me.
I want to caveat this by saying that I don't mean to offend anyone who has a different viewpoint. I'm speaking about cameras purely from my personal expectation and viewpoint and I'm far from being a knowledgeable user. I just wanted to say that it is not necessary to know too many technical details to have fun with the camera. An analogy I can think of is playing the guitar. We can learn the proper scales and music theory in the beginning but it is an intimidating way to learn and often, most casual hobbyists get disheartened. A better way, IMHO, is to simply learn the 3-4 most popular chords, and start playing songs, then learn the next 3-4 most popular chords, and so on.
Lastly, I had read about this, but am only now experiencing the fact that it is all about lenses. While a good body has many pro level features, real money should be spent on lenses not on the body. Even an entry level DSLR has "enough" features and full manual controls with dedicated buttons to keep casual hobbyists occupied. This single fact alone makes me recommend a DSLR over a fixed lens camera. It is also interesting to note that entry level DSLRs are nowadays cheaper than many superzoom fixed lens cameras.
, What I meant was the figures that discribe it and how do you come to know what figure lense to apply under what conditions ...
