At least Sony finally has a camera that can take a raw file and not
spend all day doing it.

The bad performance of the R1 when shooting raw was more then enough to
rule it out for me, this was a major problem on the F828.

I did use the F828 for a long time and as far as the controls are
concerned, well I got use to them. You had to go through menus just to
change the ISO, but since that camera really was not much good past ISO
64 you did not change it often.

Scott

What is good is that Sony (logically) is going after the beginners with
what looks like
a terrifically-priced entry camera, and they will likely go for it,
many never having owned
an SLR and therefore they aren't plagued by biases that force them to
go with Canon
or Nikon.  At the same time, they have no biases as regard controls.
They probably don't
even expect a DSLR to look like an old SLR.  But the intriguing thing
is that Sony is supposedly going to go after the mid-high end too, and
if they penetrate that, it will be
a major accomplishment for a "newcomer" to the field of SLRs.

On the subject of lenses, anyone know who will be designing the glass
for the Alpha Series cameras? I'm guessing Minolta, Zeiss, or both. Do
Sony's contracts with Minolta and Zeiss prohibit one or the other from
working on lenses of these cameras?

And Sony's not planning on doing any of the lens design in-house,
right? I trust them for electronics, but optics are another story.

Here's to the pipe dream of a series of APS-C specific Zeiss primes.

Will

Why would you expect that?     It is a new sensor so I would expect
it to perform as expected for that sensor.

Which Minolta 10 meg is it a rehash of?

Most of the European photo press - above a certain level - got invited
to the official launch of the Alpha in Morocco. I 'got one' for about 45
minutes in total with three days of waiting surrounding that 45 minutes,
in a location not of my own choosing (would you really pick a tourist
farm-camp in Morocco, in June, in mid-afternoon?).

I'm not biased towards Sony but can fairly claim a bias towards Minolta;
I've run their UK user magazine for 25 years, and somehow managed to be
objective enough to have good relationships with Nikon, Canon, Olympus
etc as a reviewer. I guess in time I may feel a bias towards Sony but so
far in my entire life all I've ever had from them is... one trip to
Morocco only six months after Nikon took everyone to the same place!

I don't hold out much hope of excellent low-light performance. On the
opening night of their conference, we had Berber horsemen and camels
doing a skirmish re-enactment by floodlight; fireworks; tents by
moonlight. On the second night we had floodlit pools and moonlight in a
hotel complex. The cameras were not made available after sundown. We got
to try them only in daylight. It would have been possible I think to
have found a shaded subject, maybe even low light, my error in not doing
so. I also failed to test many other functions of the camera in the
short while I used it.

No loan bodies have been released in the UK. There is one doing the
rounds of SE Europe, which was taken from Morocco, and the results I've
seen have not been good noisewise.

Now have a body on order (from Calumet, not a review model - I prefer to
own my cameras, and I prefer to write up models purchased through
regular channels)

David