Recently Phil Askey and Shawn Barnet have both gotten hands-on with the R1. The consensus? It takes great pictures. It's a little bit noisy, although not unacceptably so below 800; ISO 400 shots are suitable for enlargement to 5x7 and 200 and below to 8x10. The lens—or combination of the lens and short back-focus distance—is incredibly sharp, and the sensor has that certain je ne sais qua where saturation is concerned.

It can be a little sluggish, though. While the half-press shutter lag is virtually nonexistant, the full time from release press to snap can be nearly .8s in the worst case, .5-.75s for most shots. Cycle time ranges from 1.3s to nearly 9s, depending on whether the two-frame buffer is full. As Shawn sums it up:

While the Sony DSC-R1’s performance isn’t bad when compared to most “prosumer” digital cameras, many people considering it for purchase will also be considering buying a d-SLR. When stacked up against almost any d-SLR, the Sony R1’s timing performance leaves much to be desired.

That isn’t enough to keep him from giving it a rave review, though, because ”[the R1 has] very high optical quality, attractive color, and very appealing tonality in its images. - We just liked looking at the R1’s images”. And the pictures are certainly all they’re cracked up to be. Are they enough to make up for the sluggishness? Yes, if you’re ok living with the lens or springing for the telefoto or wide angle adapter. With a little planning the long writes can be worked around, and that .007s prefocus lag pays for a whole host of ills. It may still be difficult to justify the $1000 on a fixed-lens camera, though, if you think you might outgrow it, especially if you’re going to end up sinking money into an adapter.

One thing to look out for if you do pick one up: use CameraRAW. As Phil found:

there is absolutely no difference between JPEG from the camera and RAW converted using Sony Image Data Converter SR. If we switch to Adobe Camera RAW 3.3 (Beta) however we find slightly improved maximum resolution, ‘deeper’ distinction and less moire. Note also how much cleaner fine lines appear and the lack of sharpening halos around the figures.

Looks like Sony’s software people still have a little work to do.