Serious; a Sony DSC-R1 replacement...

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pjbw

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Peter
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After 6 years my R1's ISO setting button is getting erratic - a sign of its demise sooner or later!
Where can I get a camera:
1. With no geometric lens distortion from 24 - 120 mm equiv for taking architectural photos (one reviewer did find 1% barrel distortion at 24 mm in the R1. I cannot measure or notice it.). Life's too short for fiddling with interchangeable lenses.
2. I need to be able to able to take photos in all sorts of light which needs a WYSIWYG viewfinder in which I can see everything; all the camera settings, over/under exposure indication, histogram, composition grid. Life's too short for switching between an optical finder and LCD display and then checking on a screen after I have taken a photo.
3. A WYSIWYG swiveling screen so that I can hold the camera against a tree or wall, saving fiddling with a tripod.
All these feature on the R1 and
4. Preferably a bit smaller and lighter. Oh, and with a remote shutter release!
 
Current Sony SLTs have built-in distortion correction for Sony lenses and multi-frame Noise Reduction (for static subjects) which gives very clean results at high ISO's. Both features are jpg only.
 
I need RAW to give me the extra exposure latitude.
The Fujifilm X-S1 is the front runner at the moment. I will wait for an X-S2 with a laterally swiveling screen and a full review in dpreview.com.
What a fantastic camera the R1 was! http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydscr1/ . Look at pages 7 & 8 visible both in the EVF and on the screen. An impossible act to follow it seems.
It was brought out while Sony were trying to decide whether to join the DSLR herd. I am sure there is a lens mount in there but presumably the bean counters said that there would have to be a complete new range of lenses. (one reviewer said that the Zeiss 24-120mm lens was worth more the camera so the R1 was certainly massively underpriced - lucky me).
 
You can, of course, shoot RAWs as well. Just thought those jpg only features ticked a couple of your boxes (distortion control and high ISO).

Those display/EVF pics look very familiar. The SLTs are much the same (full WYSIWYG, levelling gauge, histogram etc).
 
A lot of raw converters these days have inbuilt lens corrections for a large amount of lenses.. What are you using?

E.g. the Carl Zeiss 16-80 is available for the Sony A Mount, with automatic RAW lens correction that sounds on paper like a possibillity, and the Sony SLT range offer even more flexibility with EVF/Rear screen (Phase detect focussing, Histogram, Focus peaking, Focus check magnification, spirit level).. But that's an expensive option..
 
I have my R1 set to RAW (.SR2)all the time with the 'sidecar' jpg file overprinted with the date and time.
There was/is? no lens correction software for the R1; I don't need it, the colours are as good as I want (but a studio shot recently did need a 20% green filter in Photoshop).
I thought that at one time I would have to go for a DSLR as a last resort but
http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/rumor...t-cam-in-2013/ has lots of possibilities; thank you.
The R1's CMOS sensor is just fractionally smaller than APS-C (21.5 x 14.4mm ct 22 x 15mm).
With the high-end non-DSLR market proceeding at such a pace I can afford to wait, articularly as I bought a still unused spare R1 when the price dropped after the R1 was discontinued.
Thank you all very much.
 
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