I went to Fry's Electronics today and saw that they had the Sony UX1 on display. I fiddled around with it, looked just like 1080i footage from the HC1/3/A1U, had a bit of a ghosting-like effect when the camera was forcefully shaken, but that's from hard shaking that nobody would ever encounter except maybe in a heavy earthquake. Terrific picture overall and had no CMOS ripping that I saw on the occasional HC1 (ie. When quickly panning, it would look like a section of the image splits as if the CMOS sensor couldn't keep up, yet again an unlikely event due to it being a really hard whip pan).

Shoot, I'd buy one, maybe the SR1 instead of the UX1 for the convenient hard drive recording. I also like that it kept the manual focus wheel design of the HC1 and A1U instead of opting for the HC3 build.