Well, I'm back from WDW and working my way through about 3,500 shots.
Got to meet Gdad and ukcatfan while I was there, which was fun. There's a bunch of preview shots in a thread over in the Photography forum if anyone is interested.
I'm not Joe or Gdad but I'm bored so I'll reply to this...
Unfortunately a point & shoot is no match for a dark ride. You need a combination of large lens aperture and high ISO, which means a DSLR with a fast lens (usually f/2.0 or faster) is the only option.
Indeed - and many of the shots can't be had even with most DSLRs (and there's still many shots than no DSLR is going to get - the cemetery in HM is extremely, extremely difficult for example, outside of the singing busts. I got a couple that aren't
too bad but it's tough, to say the least.) IMHO, there's really only maybe 3 <$5,000+ DSLRs currently out there that have usable ISO 6400 modes; Gdad is using one of them, I'm using another, and maybe the Sony A700, which uses the same Sony IMX21 sensor as the D300 but doesn't produce quite as nice results (and you can't disable noise reduction on it.)
Here's a shot from my just-completed trip, for an example. ISO 6400, F1.8 (I was using my 31mm F1.8 instead of my 50mm F1.4), 1/10th of a second. Even with ISO 6400 and F1.8, 1/10th is still a very slow shutter speed, and there's some motion blur here and there. Off the top of my head, F1.4 would have given me 1/15th of a second - still pretty darn slow! The image stabilization did help cure the hand shakes, at least. FWIW, the only noise reduction done was a little bit with the sliders in Lightroom, and zero in-camera.
Then there's the whole white balance issue (PotC shots especially sometimes have very strange WB)... getting focus in such darkness or even manual focusing... deciding on spot metering vs center-weighted, or exposure compensation... etc, etc etc.
Point being - the dark ride shots can be
tough (and then some!) no matter what equipment you're dragging along.
Oh, and Jazmine8, the biggest reason is that, in order to make the cameras smaller, most point-n-shoots have an imaging sensor that's about 1/15th the size of the one in most DSLRs - that's the biggest reason that they struggle so much in low light. On the other hand, you can stick your camera in a pocket or tiny bag, and not worry about getting sore from carrying around big heavy equipment.
