Dom, I am looking at the same camera; very nice feature set, and relatively portable.
I am in Saigon right now, but will be back tomorrow and will call the local Sony rep. I have a V1P that I am supposed to pick up this month but need to rethink, now. The most exciting thing about this camera is its capacity to record onto CF cards and tape---as a photographer I have over 40GB of these, so this alone is worth it for me, and I think that tape's the best archive option, and never need be touched after recording using this approach. cheers, kl