Sony Cyber-shot DSC-R1

Manual Control Options
The R1 is marketed for serious photography. All the features that make it expensive – the sensor, the lens, even the high-resolution electronic viewfinder – promote image quality. Users who spend $1000 on image quality want control, and are likely to use manual settings, or at least likely to make adjustments to the settings chosen by the camera. The R1's manual settings are more developed than its automatic settings, offering extensive flexibility and control to the user.

Focus
Auto Focus (6.0)
The R1 has three autofocus modes: single stops adjusting the lens once focus has been achieved, continuous focuses all the time, and monitor focuses continuously, but locks when the shutter release is half-depressed. The camera also has three autofocus patterns: a small center spot, a cross-shaped grouping of spots in the middle half of the frame, and a movable focus point that can placed anywhere in the frame with the joystick. The movable sensor is fun and useful, though getting it in the right spot takes more time than navigating the focus points on most DSLRs.

Speed is a recurring problem with the R1. Moving the focus point is slow, and the camera takes more time focusing than we wish it would. Comparatively, it seems slower than the Nikon D70 or the Fuji S2, both of which have about the focusing speed of most entry level DSLRs that make up the R1's price competition. We noticed the R1 overshooting focus in pretty good room light. It hit focus accurately when it stopped, but sawing back and forth slowed it down.

Manual Focus (6.25)
The R1's manual focus works well, for an electronic system. There is an actual focus ring on the lens, which is free of backlash. The viewfinder performs better than the LCD for manual focus. The center of the field of view is enlarged while the focus ring is turning, and briefly after. The system is accurate, though the view smears when the camera is moving. The only way to focus is to wait a fraction of a second for it to settle down. It's not much of a delay, but it would be significant for someone shooting action.

Metering (8.0)
The R1's three metering patterns are the most typical for digital cameras: Spot, Center-weighted and Multizone. Spot measures a small area at the center of the frame, and is most useful in manual mode. Center-weighted reads the whole frame with an emphasis on the center, and is also most useful when the photographer is monitoring and evaluating its readings. Multizone takes several readings from various spots across the frame, and compares them to settle on a good exposure. Multizone performs well in automatic modes, and coped pretty well with backlighting and other contrasty situations as we shot with it around DigitalCameraInfo.com World Headquarters. It went for compromise exposures, maintaining as much detail as possible in both light and dark areas.

Exposure (8.5)
In Program, Aperture priority and Shutter priority modes, the R1 user can bias exposure up or down as much as 2 stops, in steps of 1/3 stop. The secondary control dial adjusts the bias. Two stops seems to be the common range for exposure compensation from DSLRs to compacts. The R1's live preview shows the effect on the tones of the preview. An exposure scale is also shown.

White Balance (8.25)
The R1 has five preset white balance settings, a custom setting and an automatic setting. The presets are: Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent and Flash. It's good to see a separate setting for Flash, which tends to give slightly blue results with most Daylight settings. We didn't like the Fluorescent preset, but fluorescent tubes vary so much that we assume it's perfect for some users (and some tubes). The custom preset, our choice for most situations, is easy to set and works well. The presets and the custom setting can be made warmer or cooler with a fine adjustment control. Auto, which gave solid results in many situations, is not affected by the fine adjustment tool.

ISO (8.0)
The R1 ISO settings run from 160 to 3200, in full stops from 200 to 3200. Other than the fact that the ISO button is far away from the rest of the settings, the control is easy to operate and well executed. The ISO 3200 images are very noisy, and likely to be used when that's the only way to get the shot. Also, it would have been nice to see a lower ISO 64, 80 or 100 setting to offer some additional control over aperture and shutter speed in extremely bright conditions.

Shutter Speed (7.75)
The R1 shoots exposures of 30 seconds to 1/2000 of a second at ISOs from 160 to 800. At 1600 and 3200, it will shoot from 8 seconds up to 1/2000. The control dial selects the speed, which shows up on the display when the camera is in modes that allow the user to select shutter speeds. The R1 runs a long-exposure noise reduction routine on exposures longer than 1/6 of a second at ISOs from 160 to 400, and exposures longer than 1/25 at higher ISOs.

Aperture (7.5)
The R1's maximum aperture at its wide angle setting is f/2.8, which matches zooms on both DSLRs and long zoom compacts – and actually, it beats the cheap zooms packaged with entry level DSLRs. At telephoto, its maximum of f/4.8 is slow compared to many compact cameras, but still in the same league with the DSLR kit lenses.

Competition aside, a maximum aperture of f/4.8 is limiting when shooting available light indoors, and even for shooting action outdoors on a cloudy day. It's likely to drive users to bump up the ISO, which will leave them with noisier images.

Users moving from smaller compact cameras to the R1 should be pleased with the improvement at the bottom of the aperture range: the R1 goes all the way down to f/16. Ansel Adams wouldn't find that impressive, but it gives the R1 user a measure of flexibility.