Superb Camera with Some Faults

Author's Rating:

Pros: Beautiful build quality, great lens, wonderful handling, and ultimately terrific image quality.

Cons: Some high ISO noise, purple fringing in high contrast images, stupid flap over USB port.

The Bottom Line: 
Superb camera with outstanding build and image quality. Highly recommended as long as you don't believe all the purple fringing hysteria.

Author's Review
The 828 is a superb camera that has gotten significant bad press over purple fringing. It's an overblown issue and should not weigh heavily in a decision to buy one. The build quality is beyond reproach, the handling is superior to anything in its class, and image quality is fantastic.

There are some issues; namely the purple fringing that can show up in high contrast situations and some high-ISO noise. The purple fringing is a result of the high density CCD and cannot be avoided entirely in any digital. It is in fact exacerbated in all of the 8mp cameras. It's physics not bad design. The noise also shows up in all the 8mp pro-sumer cameras (small sensor, increased noise at high ISO settings).

So, you shoot at lower ISO settings (who would want to shoot at high settings if lower is possible?), avoid high contrast situations as much as possible and you might get 1 in 100 shots that show any unacceptable results at all.

The metering is very good and can be switched from multi-pattern to centrally biased, the lens is superior in handling (true manual focus) and is very fast with a max aperture of f2.0. Battery life is tremendous lasting me over 3 days of continuous use before recharge - so good in fact that the extra battery I bought has gone unused.

After owning at least 2 dozen film cameras and 3 digitals, this is one of the best I have owned. I don't know if it's the fourth color site (RGBE instead of RGB) or a combination of factors, but it just excels at image tacking. Highly recommended.