As good as any camera I have owned

OK, apart from using my wife's Sony DSC W7 a few times with good results, I finally made the change to digital. The Sony R1 is my first digital camera and I love it. Having been a Canon man and Contax man for years, the move to Sony might seem a bit strange. But it was a calculation based on several points: the first was the superb Carl Zeiss lens - and it is a stonker make no mistake - and the focal range was similar to what I had been used to for the previous 5 or 6 years. The size of the sensor was also a consideration for me. I am a slow photographer so write speeds, especially with RAW capture make little difference to me. Another consideration was the fixed lens. As I get older I tend to get more careless and likely to drop a lens during a change. It hasn't happened yet of course, but one never knows when it might. Now I don't have to worry about that aspect of photography. The image quality from the R1 is as good as I got from my Canon EOS 1 and EOS 3. In fact it is as good as I got from My Contax G2 Rangefinder, using CZ lenses on that. Raw is slow and files are large because it writes a jpeg back-up at the same time. If you intend shooting raw then you might want to adjust the quality of the jpeg to 1mb to give you some extra write space for the raw. For some photographers this will mean raw is rendered totally unusable. You will need a lot of storage space in the field as a 2 gig card will give you around 76 images. I have cards that add up to 8 gig - about 312 raw images in total and only just enough for a weeks vacation for me, but very tight. Fine Jpegs give really good images though and I have had some excellent prints up to 15"x10" from the files. The Sony R1 is a great camera to hold. It is well balanced and feels larger in the hand than it actually is. The downside of this camera is, my honest opinion, the EVF. Having been used to an optical viewfinder for years it took a bit of getting used to - but you will get used to it. All the buttons and knobs are in easy to use positions and this makes life easy when needing to bracket shots or use the timer control etc. If you don't want a DSLR but you want the quality that a DSLR can give your photography, there is no other choice. Worth every penny for the lens alone and that's no hype.