To trial, or not to trial…

Okay, so the D700 is a reality now and I’ve sold pretty much everything else I own except for a Nikon 50 mm f1.8, 35 mm f2.0, a 24-50 mm zoom (gives me a bit more wide angle than the 35 mm), and an 80-200 mm f2.8 that I almost sold as well. The camera produces fantastic images, even at ISO 3200, so I’m really debating on whether I would want to keep that beast of a lens at all. I was thinking of swapping for a cheaper and just as sharp 70-210 mm, or maybe even the 70-300 mm VR lens. Anyway, useless to talk about lenses right now, and that’s certainly not the topic of the posting…

The D700 is new, and of course none of the imaging software I have supports the RAW files produced by this beautiful camera, so I’ve been shooting in JPEG. The guys at Nikon seemed to have this figured out – I bought Capture 4.0 to support the RAW files from the D200, purchased not tremendously long ago (okay, maybe a couple years) and then “upgraded” (meaning you buy the damn thing full out) to Capture NX to get better “performance” handling the big-ass RAW files from the D200. The version of NX I bought was 1.0 – to process RAW files from the new camera requires yet another damn upgrade to version 2.0 of NX (that’ll be another $90, thank you very much). If you’ve gone through the effort of dumping everything you own and selling body parts to purchase a not-so-cheap, professional grade camera, would it hurt Nikon to just GIVE you the damn $90.00 software with the camera? I mean, c’mon! They probably had some “subject matter experts” tell them that their marketing model predicted that people would purchase the software and that they could do things faster, better, cheaper, or in this case, more profitably, by making the poor saps buy the damn software… bastards.

So, out of what can only be thought of as Nikon’s attempt to be “gracious” (since I’m sure they’ve heard the same criticism before), they offered a “trial” version of Capture NX version 2.0 with the camera. The question is, do I give in to temptation to load the “trial” version and obtain the ability to process RAW files effortlessly, knowing that I only have 60 days to make up my mind to buy the damn thing, or do I just put the disk back into the box for when I sell the camera someday?