Sony Cyber-shot DSC-R1

Viewfinder (6.0)
The electronic viewfinder is big and easy to look at, even with glasses. It's much better than most electronic viewfinders, and is about as big as most DSLR viewfinders. The screen itself is high-resolution at 235,200 pixels, and provides a sharp view for focusing images. The screen’s color and contrast are good enough to act as a rough exposure guide. However, the screen itself is a little jarring if you’re accustomed to an optical viewfinder. The electronic screen has a slight lag and is a bit unsettling when the camera is panned. The diopter control is easy to use and offers very fine control. We were able to get a very sharp view of the screen.

The display can show full exposure and shooting information, including a live histogram, and in playback it can show histograms for red, green, blue and luminance. The view shows battery life, what storage is in use and image number. A scale shows how far the exposure is from the metered value, from two stops above to two stops below, in 1/3-stop increments.

LCD Screen (6.0)
The LCD screen on the top of the camera flips and pivots in a camcorder-like fashion. While this is typical of many ultra-zoom compact cameras, it is unfortunately a necessity on the R1 due to the screen’s limited angle of view. The R1’s LCD measures 2 inches diagonally and has only 134,000 pixels of resolution. Its color and contrast look pretty good on their own, but they aren't as good as the viewfinder's display.

Quite a few super zooms and other transitional cameras have both viewfinders and LCDs, and in many cases, the most compelling reason to use the eyepiece is that the LCD performs poorly in bright light. The R1's LCD is pretty bad in bright light, but in general, it's not appealing to use simply because it's not nearly as good as the viewfinder. Aside from image quality, it is very much like the viewfinder and displays the same information.

Flash (7.0)
The R1's flash is small and narrow, which means that it casts harsh light. It's right over the lens, though, which means that the shadows it casts will fall behind the subjects, and often out of view. As nasty as the light is, there is plenty of it. Sony says the flash is good to nearly 28 feet in wide angle and more than 16 feet in telephoto. Our casual shots in a room with a low, white ceiling bore out those numbers, though our shots in a dingy, chaotic basement with a ceiling of century-old floor joists looked much darker.

The R1 allows two stops of flash exposure compensation above or below the metered setting, in 1/3-stop intervals.

The R1 accepts Sony dedicated flashes as well as non-dedicated flashes with a hot shoe; however, the shoe itself sits way over on the handgrip, so the flashes will cast shadows unless they are bounced, which we recommend in spaces with white ceilings.

Lens (8.5)
The Zeiss Vario-Sonnar competes with the APS-format sensor as the centerpiece of the R1. They combine to make the camera unusually capable. The lens is a 14.3 to 71.5mm zoom, for a 35mm equivalent of 24 to 120mm. The maximum aperture at wide angle is a respectable f/2.8, declining to a less-convenient f/4.8 at telephoto. Competing super zooms lately have been managing longer ranges while maintaining a wider aperture at the telephoto end. The R1's large sensor is the indirect culprit here: creating a large image for it requires longer focal lengths and wider-diameter lenses than the smaller image needed for the more common 1/2.5-inch sensors on super zooms.

We found the Vario-Sonnar lens on the R1 to be an excellent performer. It's sharp and the barrel distortion we see at the wide angle setting is minor, compared to the competition. We saw a little color fringing, less than we're used to on DSLR zoom lenses, and much less than we see on compact super zoom cameras. We like the physical lens controls, too. Both the zoom and the focus rings feel solid, and it's easy to set them accurately.

It's disappointing that the R1 lacks image stabilization – for most users, camera shake will be the most significant limit on this camera's sharpness.