This unit has the best value for $$$ ratio in it's price range, easily. Unfortunately it appears to have been discontinued (I got the last one in a blowout sale here, at any rate).
Not only is it extremely intuitive and easy to use and edit your own effect combos, it also sounds great and has very a minimal noise floor. The only "noise" I've gotten from it has been from very long reverb times or modulation effects such as phasers - which is nothing unusual for those types of effects.
Breaking down the effects individually, the mod-based stuff (chorus/flange/phase/tremolo etc.) are all very nice. Delays are nice and programmable. Pitch shifters are admittedly more useful for weird effects as opposed to corrective applications. The Doppler effect, with a bit of tweaking, is particularly convincing. Wah, amp and rotary simulators are all high-calibre, particularly the rotary. The dynamics and EQ stuff I don't really use, as I prefer to leave those functions to dedicated (and analog) units.
Also of note is the fact that you get 200 spots for user presets - equivalent to the internal memory. NOt all manufacturers are so kind in this regard (*cough* Lexicon). Also has full Sound Diver supports, so full banks of user presets can be easily loaded/saved by MIDI. I haven't tried the Sound Diver editing interface, but the reason for that is that editing is so easy from the front panel.
A couple minor complaints: the bypass button clicks quite noticably when (dis-)engaged. Also, when giving names to your own presets during the save procedure, each subsequent character space starts at the same letter as entered in the previous space, which is a little annoying until you get used to it. But honestly, the only reason I'm even complaining is so that this review doesn't seem too biased.
In all, I think my sales guy had it right when he said "Sony don't do effects boxes often, but when they do, they do it right".
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