It's like saying that an iPod Touch/iPhone can replace a desktop
They each have their own strengths
The Q is a lovely complement to the bigger dSLRs. It's incredibly accesible, easy to use, takes good to great photos, is discrete, and above all a lot of fun! (battery life is pretty bad though - about half day shooting)

Would I replace my K-5? Never. But I'd take the Q more often to places there might not be 'serious' photo opportunities and will be likely to get some pretty excellent snaps at least.

Absolutely

Matt

The RAW will be just that

But the embedded JPG can have its aspect ratio & filters set (along with the +JPG too of course).

Matt

Me? Shooting 4:3, cropping in LR.

4:3 gives 12Mp
3:2 gives 10Mp
1:1 gives 9Mp

Correct

It's just a fixed viewfinder.

Chris,
Swings and roundabouts

Q: great for portability and something unobtrusive. Can be good for wildlife too - see this thread. Limited to standard zoom and fish eye at the moment.

dSLR: wider lens options, greater image quality. (e.g. I'd never approach this quality or angle with the Q, but this was a real chunk of gear!)

My opinion - you need both

Matt

Just uploaded another shot that I'm rather pleased with from the Q:
-here-

Ok, so it's been through a little workflow, but there's some lovely detail and plenty of 'pop' from the DNG file. Hugely impressed with the Q so far - even its low light performance

(Apologies for anyone's wallet that's affected :lol

Matt

Just a little update...

Noted that the charger labelling shows that the output is 8.4V

So, think this is a hardware failure on my K-5 that in some way thinks the mirror hasn't returned properly and keeps trying again. Oh dear

Matt

As you have surmised, the bottle neck (if you can call it that) is the camera. However, a faster card will definitely be quicker to pull images off (assuming you're using a card reader )

(I use the Samsung Extreme SD cards which are more rugged than anything else I've used and are class 10)

The buffering works by storing the images in the camera's SDRAM (which is the fastest area for the camera) and then at some point it has to stop and flush this information to SD-card, and that process is relatively time consuming. Of course, if you shoot JPG only, the camera's SDRAM can fit in more images

Matt

My kids like the white one... my eldest son wants to paint it up into R2D2 style - especially the popup flash!

Matt

Park gave a little bovver over that price... in the end I got the last demo one at that price
Happy, happy, happy
Matt