The Pro1 was rather sluggish before the firmware upgrade, which it received some six months after its introduction. As a result, it lost valuable points the '8 Megapixel War' of early 2004. Michael was very enthusiastic about the Minolta A2 (which I would prefer over the Canon G7 so I don't see why Michael bought the G7 anyway, Michael, is your A2 gathering dust? But that's a different story).
The firmware upgrade for the Pro1 made it about twice as fast in focussing and overall handling, it became a totally different camera. But by then the '8 Megapixel War' was over and nobody really took notice.
Anyhow, the Pro1 has never become popular, but I've shot some 16000 frames with it and if you learn to live with its shortcomings (inherent in the type of camera), it can perform very well. Have a look at the Bahamas gallery at my website, all pictures apart from the underwater pictures were shot with the Pro1; the underwater pictures were shot with the S70, which is also a very serious above-water compact.
I'm still sort of hoping that Canon will release a Pro2 within the next 6 months or so, with basically the same lens (f2.4-3.5 28-200 mm) with preferably smoother zooming, with IS, cleaner higher ISO (400 is enough). 8 MP is enough. The articulated swivel LCD is a dream which has given me many shots that would otherwise have been much more difficult. The internal EVF is perfectly usable, I never quite understood why people hate it so much, once you get used to it, it behaves very much like an ordinary SLR viewfinder with information overlaid, albeit with less resolution.
Purple fringing is not a great problem with this camera if you shoot RAW; it only shows up under very specific circumstances (twigs of bare trees spring to mind)but various types of chromatic aberration can be corrected quite successfully in Adobe Camera RAW.
I always shoot RAW and couldn't do without. The Pro1 shoots 4 frames in quick succession, but then dozes off for about 12 seconds to clear the buffer. It's a perfect combination with something like a Pentax 67ii set or a 4x5 field camera set (I have both).
Gerard Kingma
www.kingma.nu