BTW, I have a Z1 on my lap right now, so if anyone wants some hands-on opinion I can try to answer any questions :).

So far I've only had a chance to film the dog in the back garden, but generally it's produced a great picture with decent sound: unfortunately I don't have an HDTV to view footage on, but everything I've tried looks good when downconverted to a normal TV and -- other than apparent interlacing artifacts -- on my PC monitor. No sign of dropouts so far.

The only two issues I've really noticed are lousy placement of the Firewire socket, and stuttering in some pans: fast pans are fine, slow pans are fine, pans in the middle look a bit stuttery on my PC but generally OK on the LCD panel and a standard PAL TV: which seems consistent with the 'dead zone' mentioned in this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=38924&highlight=pan

I'm guessing (OK, hoping :)) that the deinterlacing of the video footage on the PC is causing the apparent 'stutter'.