I know i know.. there will b the die hard Nikon fans telling me, stick with Nikon, purely bc its a Nikon. In no way am i dissing Nikon for leaning towards the Sony, to me its just a photographic tool. brand means almost nothing. xcept Canon, their quality control has been lacking horribly lately... otherwise you would see a canon 5D mark II up there instead. Working @ a camera shop lets me realize these things.. lol. Ok, so on to my point... I've been leaning towards a D3 for a while now, and through LimeLight studio im able to use one almost whenever i want to (thanks Josh!) Its a fantastic camera that pretty much can be put through anything or any type of shooting situation. but.. for the style of photography id like to do and pursue, higher resolution seems what id like to lean for.. i do love being able to shoot at super high ISO's on the D3 however, but the images that come straight from the camera, imo could b a little bit sharper.. i know i know, un-sharp mask, etc, but still. having the flexibility of 24 mega pixels, vs 12 is quite the jump. and artificial sharpening to me just does not look as natural. maybe i just need to practice a bit more. lol. I do love photojournalistic photography, but it seems the type of work/art/fun i like to do would lean more towards the editorial side of it. not so much commercial studio stuff, but i do tend to like to have my lighting situations controlled as best as possible. this comes to the noise factor. i rarely try and push my camera above 800 iso. i know with the D3 this is no prob, in fact i have made poster sized prints from shots of ISO 2,000! (if you ever go into our studio there is a poster on the wall of DJ Tiesto i shot w/ a D700 @ ISO 200 and its looks creamy as fresh butter.) but in regular usage its pretty rare i push my camera that high. so... i know that the a900 is not all that great in handling the low light situations, so im prepared for that.. my 2nd biggest point is price. @ $5,000 for just the body for the D3 (well, actually $3,799 w/ my discount through nikon ), its pretty steep for just the camera body when my photography income does not quite match that. not that the a900 is cheap by any means... but the body is about $2,699, aside from a discount through sony which i have no looked into yet. this means, that not only would i save money on a new camera body, w/ higher resolution, but i could also invest in a 24-70 2.8 Sony/Ziess lens which apparantly is the fucking shit! haha. that body + lens combo comes out to about the same price as just a D3 body. i dont own that nikon lens either, and i would love to have it if i had the full frame body. hell i want that lens either way. which would total my nikon fund to 7k compared to my sony 5k.
I guess all im really waiting for is to get my hands on the Sony and actually play with it myself.. we havent gotten one @ the shop yet so idk what to think of it quite yet. seems like most of the test shots ive seen from it actually look pretty decent. but id rather put it through my own paces and judge for myself. anyone else out there have any hands on with one? id love input about it. The Nikon is still definitely there, ive used it so much that im already well aware of what its capable of, but saving myself some cash would help my ass out a lot. $2,000 is a good chunk of money to save if its worth it ya know. gonna b time to buy a new car soon, so that would come in handy. and of course we all know in the future a D3x will b on its way, or whatever new bad ass system is out. lol. thanks for reading this everyone. off to work i go!

-Rob-