Frank, I think Phil made a major mistake in conducting his test. He took his time but one thing he didn't do, was to swap the A2 for another as soon as he noticed such drastic performance gap with the other cameras in that group. Michael went through 3 A2s before he was happy with the results, some other reviewers have since been sending A2s back for better results. I think the A2 image quality with all the shots that we have already seen posted on the web prior to Phil's test is in par with the rest of the 8mp cams. Like Michael he could have mentioned about QC issues at Minolta. I think Phil has done the photographic community a great disservice by testing a sub par A2 unit. I still think Michael rocks in real life reviews. S