camera for christmas: help me decide

"Plus, while I've never had a camera that shot RAW, I understand that's the best format if you want to actually print photos, and that seems like a good feature to have. "

I've been using Canon digitals since 2002, and about 99.99% of everything I shoot is RAW.

If you have a dead-perfect eye for exposure, and if you have the ability to fool around a lot at the shot time, bracket exposures a lot, and really take some time with it, then maybe you do not need RAW.

OTOH, most of us find RAW files to be handy so that you can tweak in your exposure (or other factors) at the time of the processing at the computer. I've found that I can tweak exposures by a small fraction of a stop and get good results. If I need to tweak it a lot, then I screwed up too much at the time of the shoot. If I have to correct a RAW file by 1 stop, that is serious. Two stops is ridiculous. Keep in mind that you can still hide a multitude of sins from within Photoshop.

–B.G.–

del

Photokina is on next month.
Some new releses will make to the shelves for xmas, so it may be worth waiting for that.
Franco
(Photokina is the largest photo gear exibition, biennial)