
Olympus FE120 quick point and press. (older model but still very capable)
Canon EOS500D. Awesome SLR.
A tripod is not an essential for night photography, but it does help and yes I do use one sometimes.
placing the camera on a solid surface works very well but you can't always point it exactly where you want to.
It is very difficult (but not impossible) to get a good sharp image if you hold the camera in your hands.
I normally reduce my pictures from full scale to 1920 X 1080 for a slide show on my TV. They are truly fantastic to look at on a wide screen TV.

Believe it or not some of my photos here are a bit fuzzy because I didn't know I was supposed to turn off the lens auto stabilizer in the EOS when using the tripod.

Fortunately it doesn't show up because I have to reduce the resolution of the pictures even further to fit in the forum.