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-megapixel shots instead of 12. But amazingly enough, in low light, those 6-megapixel shots are actually sharper and more detailed than the 12-megapixel shots from the same camera.

Sony gave the sensor a makeover, too. According to Sony, a sensor is actually a sandwich of layers: tiny lenses on top, then color filters, then some wiring, then the actual light detectors on the bottom. Sony says that in its new Exmor R sensor, the circuitry layer has been moved to the bottom, so that less light is lost en route through the stack.

Does any of this make any difference?

It sure does. I spent three successive evenings shooting the same twilight and nighttime scenes with the Sony, the Fuji and my own Canon PowerShot SD880, a terrific 2008 camera with no special low-light features.

Now, I am a rabid fan of Canon pocket cameras, having found them to be the best on the market year after year. But in almost every one of my after-sundown tests, the Canon photo was too blurry to be useful. The Fuji and Sony shots were sometimes grainy (an S.L.R. would have done better) but were always sharper, and managed to capture something in anything shy of total blackness. (A slide show of example shots accompanies this article at nytimes.com/personaltech.)