- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 26 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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6 out of 6 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Great Great Camera"
Pros: Great lens yields great photos, and the camera design provides a solid handhold (it's decidedly not miniaturized)
Cons: Manual focus is tough given the viewscreen's resolution
Summary: First a disclaimer: this is my first digital camera. For years, I used a manual Olympus, enjoyed switching lens and had a grand old time.
But, wanting to send family and friends my photos, I realized digital is obviously the way to go--but, because I did not have auto-slr lenses, buying a dslr seemed very pricey.
The R1 has a fantastic lens, plenty of range to get family shots, landscape photography (my favorite), and even some sports photography. No, you can't zoom close enough to see the goalie's nose hairs, but do you really need to? Most of the sports shooting I did with a zoom lens stayed between 100-200mm. And the R1's wide angle shots are fantastic.
To match the R1 lens with a dslr like the EOS 20D, which is what I thought I would buy, costs $1200 if you go with the cheap lens (which has too much noise at the wide angles) or $2200 if you get a great lens to match the 20D's capability.
But lenses these days are being made for specific image sensor sizes, not the 35mm film standard as before. It's as if a new sized film frame came out every year or two. You can either go with the 35mm standard lenses and their "step-up," which eliminates wide angle possibilities, or get lenses that match your camera's image sensor--but what happens if image sensors keep increasing in size? You need to buy new lenses all over again.
The R1 bypasses all that with an excellent wide-to-midrange zoom lens.
The design of the R1 is also fantastic. Because the viewscreen is on top, there's plenty of room on the back for all the necessary buttons AND a place to hold onto the camera. I tried all the competing prosumer and dslr cameras and all of them were too small to hold onto for an extended length of time. I don't understand why all the other cameras are designed for such tiny hands.
The R1's controls make sense to me, although I have no real basis of comparison.
The only catch with the camera is that I have not found the viewscreen to be sharp enough to provide effective manual focus--but as I have gotten used to the camera, I find that the various autofocus features (including the option to move the autofocus point anywhere in the frame) to more than compensate.
And I certainly can't wait until Sony provides a fisheye adaptor.
But the viewscreen on the top is fun, and at least for now, everybody oohs and ahhs everytime you pull this camera out of the bag.
I highly recommend this camera, especially to people who know what they're doing.
- 1 reply to this review
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After all, we buy cameras to take pictures (for other needs we by camcorders or MP3 players)
R1 takes best shots I've ever seen, and this is bottom line
Where to buy
Sony Cyber Shot DSC-R1:
$1,800.00
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$1,800.00 | Yes |
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