One neat feature of my D5100 is its ability to judge the EV range in the image area and, if necessary, reduce contrast automatically to avoid losing the high and low ends of the image. I shot a picture inside the mouth of a cave, with normal outdoor light visible in part of the image; while the extreme EV differences resulted in a washed-out image, it was way better than it would have been without the camera's auto adjustment and I was able to make it look pretty decent with post processing. My Canon XSi would have done much worse.