Battleangel

Over at The Digital Camera Resource Page. One of the first review available. Snippets:

So what areas aren’t so hot? While I think noise levels in images are comparable, the F828 does tend to have higher levels of purple fringing (or whatever you want to call it) than the competition. Although the F828 has its fair share of manual controls, cameras like the DiMAGE A1 blow it away (saturation bracketing, anyone?). Most of the cameras I listed have a RAW mode, but the Sony’s is a little more annoying than the rest. First of all, you must use Sony’s Image Converter to do anything with them — and there’s no Mac version at this time. Secondly, there’s a 12-13 second delay per shot while the camera saves the RAW file to the memory card — the DiMAGE A1 keeps shooting as if nothing happened.

What I liked:

- Very good photo quality, 8 Megapixel resolution (though note issues below)
- Fast 7X optical zoom lens
- Amazing low light focusing abilities
- Full manual controls
- Hot shoe for external flash
- LCD/EVF are useful in low lighting conditions
- Backlit LCD info display
- Built like a tank; easy to hold
- Rotating body allows for creative shooting
- Excellent battery life
- Live histogram in record mode
- Manual zoom and focus rings
- CompactFlash Type II and Memory Stick Pro slots
- Gimmicky Nightshot, useful NightFraming features
- Excellent macro mode
- JPEG saved with each RAW and TIFF image recorded
- VGA, 30 frame/second movie mode

What I didn’t care for:

- Images slightly noisy (esp. at higher ISOs, or when compared to D-SLRs)
- Too much purple fringing for such an expensive camera
- Can’t save favorite settings to mode dial like other cameras
- Not as many manual controls as other cameras
- RAW files slow to save to memory card, slow to convert in software; can only convert RAW files using Sony’s software
- Mac-unfriendly software: ImageMixer is not OS X native, Image Data Converter does not exist (yet)
- No memory card included

A little disappointing to be honest. Like the A1 it fails in areas (like image quality) where it should really excel.
The more I look into the matter, the more it becomes evident that D-SLRs like the Canon Digital Rebel are the way to go. Forget about a zoom lens then .. sigh. Either that or buy a much cheaper fixed lens model.