You have a button to turn zebras off except when you need them for spot reference, so if its in the way of focusing your not using them correctly. Nice thing about the levels of the EX-1 zebra is that the skin tone (settable) zebra is very light in the viewfinder and you can function with it on. I've always hated 70% zebras before because they screwed up my focusing. Have the button to turn them off and having them very light in the first place makes them very useful.

Thanks again everyone for all the great tips. I just got back from my shoot and it was a great success. I loved using the EX1 and I definitely benefited from taking a lot of your advice.

The best tips were to use peaking and expanded focus. I pretty much left peaking on all the time which helped a lot with focusing, and I also used expanded focus to aid focusing for almost every shot.

Just for the record, I had zebras set to 100% and only used them occasionally for a few seconds using the zebra button. I thought that 70% zebras conflicted too much with recognizing the peaking lines, and so I just used 200% zebras to make sure I wasn't blown out in some high contrast shots.

I did accidentally hit the Full Auto button once, and I knew to check that right away when I saw that things were acting a bit odd. So that was also a great tip.

I'm not sure what additional info Doug's DVD would provide, but I also read most of the manual on the plane ride to the shoot, and that (along with asking questions here) didn't cost me anything. $100 seems like a bit much, and I did fine without it.

Thanks again.

I think the $100 dollars for Doug's DVD is cheap for the info it gives. I was up and running with an EX1 for an important shoot in one day. It gave confidence and removed doubt that a potential cock up was not far away. The EX1 guide is also good as particular information is much more easy to find and is clearer to understand than Sonyspeak.

To each his own I guess. I'm glad I saved the money.