I hope for their sake that these things are backwards compatible with their lastr gen S-AIR products.

Otherwise they are going to have some unhappy early adopters (ie: fans they can ill afford to alienate).

I agree.. it's a little difficult to take a something like this seriously when it excludes one of the largest/oldest manufacturers of digital cameras.

They've been selling them for $99 for a week or so.

Wallanamakapiisai

On a related note. Anyone have any idea if US retailers are selling the "old" (with a power brick) or "new" (with internal power) version of the PSTwo?

I'm wondering about Amazon in particular since I ordered one from them (along with an LCD screen) a few days ago.

One thing to note about the PSTwo with the built in power supply.

Looks like it is missing the mounting holes for attaching LCD displays (if you are into that sort of thing).

http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=psx2&thread.id=1375208

"photographic tool that will start a positive trend with other camera makers"

I very much hope so.

I was seriously bummed when camera companies started moving away from fully featured, highly manual, awesome quality compacts (though I guess I use that term a little loosely). Like when Sony killed its V line, or when Canon started neutering its G line.

I have no interest (at the moment) of going DSLR (yes I know they are regarded as the ultimate in digital photography tools... but I kind of disagree a little), so here's to hoping to a reversal of that trend.

But couldn't that be said for noise as well?

I mean if one camera has more noise but sharper pics... and another one has less noise but softer pics, don't they pretty much amount to the same thing?

No doubt that DP1 seems competent enough... I just wonder about it being a real benchmark in image quality. It seems more like a benchmark in fitting an SLR sized sensor into a compact camera body.

So when someone says SLR quality images, what does that really mean? Is it the characteristic shallow depths of field (that's what most laymen seem to respond to most when they make that comment). Low noise relative to ISO settings? Dynamic range? And then how does that relate to the DP1 (noise wise it doesn't really seem to stack up, dynamic range seems comparable to other high end compacts).

I've gotten such compliments (well not really compliments.. .more questions "were those taken with an DSLR"), for pictures taken with much older cameras with much smaller sensors.

Sorry, I hope I'm not coming off as a judgemental jerk or something. I'm just really curious about what makes the DP1 such a watershed.

The sensor size is certainly impressive... But again, I guess I just expected more from the use of a larger sensor.

Hrm, some of those prosumers have RAW capabilities (I miss that segment of cameras can you tell? ^_^)... though they tend to be kind of slow (shot to shot) when shooting in that mode.

How's the Sigma's RAW performance?

As for flickr: Do you mean just enter DP1 into the search field, instead of using the camera finder? The "camera finder" is what I find limiting... but good point. I should just use the base search functions.

For example, you might want to take a look at pics taken by the various prosumer cams that have come down the pipe over the years (Sony V3, Canon Gs, etc).

PBase is a good choice for this (flickr's camera search is OK... just wish it wasn't so limited... though maybe I just haven't figured it out entirely).

I guess I expected that the images from the Sigma would be sharper.

Perhaps in order to achieve it's low-noise, it is applying some noise reduction? Arono, I'm no expert. Just giving my IMHOs.