diff --git a/solr/CHANGES.txt b/solr/CHANGES.txt
index 20d7caf28ac..14b6fa0c831 100644
--- a/solr/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/solr/CHANGES.txt
@@ -360,6 +360,10 @@ Other Changes
 * SOLR-2862: More explicit lexical resources location logged if Carrot2 clustering 
   extension is used. Fixed solr. impl. of IResource and IResourceLookup. (Dawid Weiss)
 
+* SOLR-1123: Changed JSONResponseWriter to now use application/json as its Content-Type
+  by default.  However the Content-Type can be overwritten and is set to text/plain in
+  the example configuration. (Chris Male)
+
 Documentation
 ----------------------
 
diff --git a/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/response/JSONResponseWriter.java b/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/response/JSONResponseWriter.java
index 4a9e0f81a82..c14a2a57a23 100644
--- a/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/response/JSONResponseWriter.java
+++ b/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/response/JSONResponseWriter.java
@@ -40,9 +40,13 @@ import org.apache.solr.search.ReturnFields;
  */
 
 public class JSONResponseWriter implements QueryResponseWriter {
-  static String CONTENT_TYPE_JSON_UTF8="text/x-json; charset=UTF-8";
+  static String CONTENT_TYPE_JSON_UTF8="application/json; charset=UTF-8";
 
-  public void init(NamedList n) {
+  private String contentType;
+
+  public void init(NamedList namedList) {
+    String contentType = (String) namedList.get("content-type");
+    this.contentType = (contentType != null) ? contentType : CONTENT_TYPE_JSON_UTF8;
   }
 
   public void write(Writer writer, SolrQueryRequest req, SolrQueryResponse rsp) throws IOException {
@@ -55,12 +59,10 @@ public class JSONResponseWriter implements QueryResponseWriter {
   }
 
   public String getContentType(SolrQueryRequest request, SolrQueryResponse response) {
-    // using the text/plain allows this to be viewed in the browser easily
-    return CONTENT_TYPE_TEXT_UTF8;
+    return contentType;
   }
 }
 
-
 class JSONWriter extends TextResponseWriter {
   private String namedListStyle;
   private String wrapperFunction;
diff --git a/solr/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml b/solr/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml
index cc8a5f304f0..b3df56e5915 100755
--- a/solr/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml
+++ b/solr/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml
@@ -1572,6 +1572,15 @@
      <queryResponseWriter name="phps" class="solr.PHPSerializedResponseWriter"/>
      <queryResponseWriter name="csv" class="solr.CSVResponseWriter"/>
     -->
+
+  <queryResponseWriter name="json" class="solr.JSONResponseWriter">
+     <!-- For the purposes of the tutorial, JSON responses are written as
+      plain text so that they are easy to read in *any* browser.
+      If you expect a MIME type of "application/json" just remove this override.
+     -->
+    <str name="content-type">text/plain; charset=UTF-8</str>
+  </queryResponseWriter>
+  
   <!--
      Custom response writers can be declared as needed...
     -->