I am interested in why you think these qualities are of interest in a point and shoot ?

Would you care to elaborate?

Hi Mike.

Actually an f2.8 lens is not that uncommon a starter point in a lot of point and shoots especially older ones that rarely had more than a x 3 or 4 zoom. I was surprised when I bothered to look it up.

In fact if you were looking at this from the point of a basic film camera none of these requests would seem that unusual, which is why I asked for clarification. I get the feeling someone has transferred from film here and is still thinking along the same lines.

I'd be interested to find out.

DSLRs are not point and shoots.

More of the budget is spent on things like additional memory and processing power.

Long open shutter speeds allow for the sensor to become quite hot and pixels over expose at random. This requires additional algorithms and quite fast / powerful processors to get this under control and does account for a portion of the cost in a DSLR. In one respect this is not like film and becomes a specialist feature that costs money to produce. The light gathering capabilities of smaller photo-sites of a bridge camera means extra amplification and even more processing power to keep that type of noise under control.

The change over from CCD to Cmos chips has help bring down the cost of production of digital cameras but the differences in how they are used to capture an image mean even more problems for noise in those situations.

It is not economically viable to make this type of feature for a small sensor camera. You say you can't afford an HS10 but what you propose could add another 20% to the cost.

You don't actually need longer times to get the same effects but you may need to combine the output of more than one frame or get used to working faster.

There has always been limitations to any technology.

It's up to people to find working solutions with what they have.