minnesotti wrote:

I would like to buy a compact or pocketable P&S camera. It should have
a high sensitivity, so that I could shoot the night scenes in the city
with excellent quality.

No, high sensitivity will just give you lots of noise. For quality stick to
the lowest ISO with a long exposure.

I heard that FujiFilm FinePix F10/F11/F30 has
a good CCD sensor allowing to shoot in dark... however, I never held
it in my hands and I read the reviews that its sensitivity is not
really that high, and the image has a "watercolor" quality in it.

Sounds like overly-agressive noise reduction. Avoid it.

Besides, I do not think that its lens is sharp enough as say
Panasonic FZ30 or LX1. I presume that the camera with the desired
qualities should have larger pixels, and thus a larger sensor...
which means the lens should be big, too... and I want a pocketable
camera.

If there is no such camera, then I want a camera with a high dynamic
range. I want to shoot both bright sun-lit sceneces and to resolve
details in shadows, in the same picture. Again... I am not aware of
such a camera. Can you advise any ? Thanks.

You need a camera that can save in RAW mode. You convert the RAW image into
a 16 bit per channel image then you can lighten the shadows to extract the
details you want.

The LX1 is an excellent choice of camera which is both pocketable and has
RAW mode. It also has a very good lens, but is a little noisier than other
cameras. This is probably due to less aggressive noise reduction - you can
always add your own later, but you can't take it away, so arguably it's a
good thing. One disadvantage is that the RAW files are exceedingly large,
16MB per picture, only 52 per 1GB card.

Still a good choice though, if you buy plenty of memory cards to go with it!

Paul