Digital Revolution...or is that Revolt?

Viva 'la Revolution!
I'm pretty excited. I take a LOT of photos for my family, for work (construction sites), and occasionally for web design. For the past few years, I've used the incredibly reliable Sony F-707. It can take great shots, but it's slowwww...... I miss way too many shots with this camera.

Well, one client site is needing a lot of new product photos for the upcoming Christmas season sale. Being the opportunist that I am, I've arranged to buy a nice digital SLR camera for this purpose, and of course, I'll keep it as my primary, replacing the Sony.

I have a lot of acquaintances who are digital camera enthusiasts, who have offered many recommendations, but ultimately, I've narrowed it to the Canon
EOS Rebel (now in Black!), and the Nikon D70.

I very seriously considered, but decided against the Canon 10D, because
it's; A) discontinued, B) identical to the Rebel in image quality, C) more
expensive than the Rebel, and you can hack the Rebel to unlock the 10D features?,
and D) because it's a bit too big/bulky for me, especially with the optional
battery grip.

I also seriously considered, but decided against the Canon 20D, because
it's more than I really need, and more than I really want to spend.

So why the Nikon D70 or Canon EOS Rebel? Well....

The form factor of the Nikon D70 and the phenomenal speed of the unit are
extremely impressive. It is second to none in "feel" in my opinion. Really
fits me like a glove. And it seems pretty easy to use, and the battery
is rated to last nearly 1000 shots between charges. No need for a bulky
battery grip. Also, there is no buffer lag when it writes to the CF Card.
It bypasses that process issue with nifty programming logic.

Similarly equipped, the EOS Rebel is approx $600 cheaper than the D70, thanks
to current rebates.
Package: camera body, battery, the 18-55 stock lens, and a 75-300mm F/3.5-5.6
lens (Canon includes image stabilized lens)

Additional considerations? The Canon body is not nearly as nice as the
D70. It's a tad bit too small for me, and with the battery grip, it's WAY
too bulky for my purposes. I can feel my face pressed up against the LCD
when looking through the view finder. And the shutter/mirror action just
is not a smooth and nice feeling as the Nikon. HOWEVER, the Canon offers
many decent quality lenses with image stabilization for around $450, whereas
the Nikkor lens with Image Stabilization starts at several thousand dollars,
and is only available in a few select sizes.

Everyone I spoke too wisely stated to focus (pun intended) on the lens,
and not so much on the body? so $600 cheaper and including image stabilization
and a full line of additional fairly inexpensive lenses has me really thinking
EOS Rebel? but I just can't get that groovy D70 feeling out of my mind.

So my plan was to rent the D70 this weekend, with a 75-300mm F3.5-5.6 VR lens and a non-VR (image stabilized) lens and will shoot as much as I can to compare to the Canon images. I have seen many great EOS based sample images, and find them to be stunning.
I want to see how the Nikon D70 does. I have received some sample images from the D70 from my friends, and frankly, I find them disappointing. Just not as crisp as I'd like, and some of these guys shoot with $2,000 fast glass lenses!

Digital Revolt!
I have a screaming fast primary workstation computer at home for digital image processing, web design, etc... It's a Dell XPS, RAID 0, with additional fast and very large storage drives, and packed with oodles of RAM. It's very cool and extremely fast, but lately, it's grown very unreliable. As I write this, the storage drives have disappeared from the device manager, again.

I think that the $600 cheaper Rebel is looking more and more attractive, considering that I am going to have to buy a new PC. I've grown to the point where I can't trust this one. To many weird faults, too many boot failures when the RAID array fails, too many dropped network associations, etc....

My Dad will smugly tell me to buy a G5 Mac and worry no more, but someone would need to pony up the THOUSANDS of dollars of PC based software that I would need to replace with Mac friendly versions, and that's not going to happen on my budget.

sigh.....