Perhaps you caught this news story, but Epson very recently found 30 brand new unsold R-D1s and planned to distribute them somehow. Could be your chance! I suspect these are pretty collectable now, especially having used the Leica M mount.
One of the strangest things on that camera is it has a physical analogue gauge to display how much free space the memory card has, like the fuel level in an old car.
I have noticed that there has been a kind of resurgence in older digital cameras that used ccd sensors and different sensor filters compared to contemporary models. A lot of people feel like new cameras now are almost clinical in how they take pictures and because of that they lack personality that older, quirkier cameras had, a similar argument to why some vintage glass is desirable despite being technically inferior to what you can get now.
I have heard those complaints from a few--though not a lot of--people, but coming more from a video background that has always struck me as not really understanding how color works, either up front with aesthetic setting or on the back end with color grading.
And if you don't want to get into grading, Fuji loads up their cameras with film stock analogues that can give you all the quirk you ever wanted.
I've heard that argument from people before. I love that the stock images from my nikon z5 are fairly clinical. its the best starting point for when I load them up into dx0 photolab and start adjusting all the variables/adding film simulations.
What I love is that I can get a nice SHARP, low distortion rendering. You can't fix that in post.
There's definitely a difference in the way CMOS and CCD sensors render colors. CMOS does not do well with highlights. C-41 process negative film is still the gold standard as far as dynamic range goes, but CCDs and non-Bayer CMOS sensors like the Foveon come far closer than modern Bayer CMOS sensors. They also tend to look warmer than modern CMOS images, especially older Sony sensors from the late 2000s. Comparing the RAW output from one of my older Sony Alpha DSLRs vs a Canon 6D from a few years ago it's definitely noticeable.
How do you compare the RAW data? If you're just loading up images in your editor then the editor is probably applying a camera specific profile that modifies colors and curve among other things. Color rendering depends on the lens too somewhat IIRC.
You're correct in that the demosaicing algorithms have a huge impact on image quality as well, I'm just comparing the finished result of whatever Lightroom spits out at me. It's entirely possible the camera profiles are affecting image quality but if you assume everything else is the same then I've generally found better highlight recovery on CCDs than CMOS sensors. Totally anecdotal, I know, but there's a decent bit of agreement on photography forums as well (I know how superstitious and subjective photographers tend to be, so take this all with a grain of salt.)
I find the color rendering of my 5D and 1Ds3 (2005 and 2007 designs) to be slightly, but noticeably, different from new cameras.
One quantitative difference is that there's less green sensitivity in the blue raw channel than modern sensors, which hurts their noise performance in warm lighting conditions.
I'm not sure exactly how that affects color rendering in terms of metamerism, but it is visible in my experience.
For just a moment I thought you were advising carrying an Epson scanner, with a power brick + battery, and pointing at the world, and scanning it. (Like people who use iPads for photography.)
But since I’m apparently old enough to have digital camera nostalgia, I always did want an Epson R-D1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epson_R-D1