This is the question the digital camera industry does not want you to ask.
Really?
The industry only cares about Mega pixels, face recognition, video and very large and heavy zoom lenses.
The industry, like any industry, cares about whatever it thinks its customers want. Sometimes the industry's marketing department and the consumers feed on each other in an endless cycle, yes. The industry thinks that more megapixels is a way to create consumer interest, so they push that in their marketing. Consumers pick up on it and demand more megapixels, and any manufacturer who doesn't want to get squeezed out of the market goes along with the gag to the best of their ability.
It leaves us with niches. The consumer camera niche, which does indeed care about mega-pixels, ultra-zoom, image stabilization, face detection and so on. The prosumer niche, which gives us G10's and Ricoh GRD's, and the like. The pro-am, which gives us the various micro four-thirds devices and the less-expensive dSLR cameras, and the professional, which gives us the Canon and Nikon full-frames, etc.
And each camera manufacturer is trying to find a nice they can carve out for themselves. Sigma is pushing Foveon technology (slowly). Fuji still uses the Nikon dSLR bodies but with their own tech sensors, which emphasize latitude and wedding photogs seem to love 'em. Sony is clearly going after both Canon and Nikon on the high end. Pentax and Samsung and Olympus and Panasonic all have odd little niches to go after. I'm a Pentax fan because of their continued ability to be backwards-compatible with every Pentax lens ever made, but that's my little quirk.
Megapixels? It might - just might - be nearly over. It seems that we're pushing some technical boundaries that make it hard to keep doubling the number of megapixels every six months or so (the current release cycle), so naturally the manufacturers are starting to downplay 'more megapixels' as the be-all and end-all. They want to find out what the next big demand will be with consumers. Blue-tooth? Wifi? GPS? Enhanced facial recognition? Casio is experimenting with ultra-fast captures, an interesting niche to be sure, if limited.
It's always an interesting dance. Find out what consumers want and give it to 'em. If they don't know what they want, sell them something until they do want it.
I get all that. But to me, it's all perfectly normal. For others, it's a continued sense of hostility and us-versus-them paranoia. Like they're plotting a world takeover or something. You'd think they were selling health care. Like a camera company ever chased you down, tied you up, and forced you to demand more megapixels. Sheesh. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
In answer to the OP's question, I suspect that Keith had the right answer. Fuji is big on enhanced latitude, to the extent that lots of wedding photographers swear by them. I would have thought the S5 would have more latitude than the S3, but I have no experience with either, so I do not know.
In any case, wedding photographers would tend to have the inside track on what camera has the best latitude. They shoot lots of very black and very white scenes, so the ability to handle extreme contrast and light/dark scenes is very important to them.
I also found this online:
http://photocritic.org/25-cameras-with-the-best-dynamic-range/
