Dee Dee,
once the ads run, I'll be happy to share them with you.

I'm afraid there is no cure for you -- you are an equipment junkie! The Mark II, huh? Good luck. I believe in getting the best you can afford. I wish I could work with the 1DsMkII but my budget is simply not there. For me, and the way I shoot, the XT offers exceptional image quality for a remarkable price. On the other hand, if I were working outdoors exclusively in all kinds of weather, I'd have to be at the 1D level.

Shooting RAW give you the most control AFTER the shot. It bypasses the camera's processing computer and lets you work with what the sensor actually captured. And to do it over and over again without ever damaging the original file. A downside is the fact that most cameras don't handle a long burst of RAW files as fast or as long as Large/Fine jpegs. RAW files are much bigger and eat up more of the buffer. For example, I can fire off 40 frames with the XT at 3 frames/second at Large/Fine jpeg and only 7 RAW files in a similar burst.

With RAW, you have to process the files in either Adobe Camera RAW (part of PhotoShop) or one of the other independent RAW processors such as Capture One, Bibble or others. But the additional back-end processing lets you do a lot more with a lot more control of color, white balance, sharpening, contrast, shadow & highlight detail, etc.

Jim