The Sony DSC-F828 is the first Sony camera that I would ever seriously consider. I always admired Sony's form factor with the swiveling body and nice Carl Zeiss lens, but the previous lack of a raw mode and insistence on Memory Stick media put me off. Sony has finally fixed both concerns. Now, you get a 28-200mm equiv. lens with a bright f2.0-2.8 aperture and a massive 8 megapixel sensor, all in a two pound package. Not bad! As far as I can tell, the only feature it seems to lack is automatic orientation detection. My Canon G3 happily rotates my images for me if I shoot vertically.

Also, when you get into RAW mode, you're wedding yourself to that vendor's crappy software on your PC. I could gripe for hours about Canon's software. Heaven only knows whether Sony is any better.

I do, at some distant point in the future, want a D-SLR, but I'm in no hurry. I'm waiting for the technology to stabilize somewhat. In particular, as sensor sizes shake out, you'll see many more lenses engineered to be lightweight and smaller, taking advantage of the smaller sensor size. Heaven knows, maybe we'll eventually see digital rangefinders with interchangeable lenses (analogous to Leica M-series cameras, and perhaps even made by Leica). That would be my preference.

Also, as it happens, one of the features of my G3 that I've turned out to love the most is the rotating and flipping screen. You can easily shoot from the hip, shoot from far over your head, and so forth. It's amazingly versatile and none of the D-SLRs offer such a feature. Yet.