John Edwin M. wrote: > Let's not even get into what's available to the pros > from Nikon's and Canon's Professional Services. Very true. When Canon set out to win over professionals, it was at least as much a bettle between CPS and NPS as it had anything to do with the cameras. A minor additional point is that besides rental availability, registered CPS and NPS pros get priority turnaround on service. It's worth a lot to a pro to be able to get a broken camera fixed in two days as opposed to having to wait two weeks. John P. wrote: > One thing that puzzles me about a lot of pros (and is common although more > understandable in wannabes) is that they are pretty gullible in terms of > their equipment selection. They tend to buy things on the basis of splashy > and sometimes deceitful advertising campaigns rather than real world results > and value for money. I suspect that many are still at least partly amateurs > at heart and find the shiny big-name toys irresistable. Being well-trained > consumers, they also don't have the gumption to take a step back and look at > what they are really getting. I can also attest that for many studio pros, it's a question of what their most immediate clients, usually in the form of a species of quasi-hominid bipeds called AD's (art directors), expect them to be using. Many AD's a decade ago (i.e., when I was last involved in that world) expected to see Nikon and Hasselblad. Those were more or less the only brands a lot of them knew. If you shot Pentax and Rolleiflex, or any other offbeat combination, you'd have a lot of explaining to do on a regular basis (and a lot of reassuring). In those days, using Mamiya was a dead giveaway that you were a wedding/portrait guy who had to deal with the public a lot, and using Bronica was tantamount to admitting that your studio wasn't very prosperous. --Mike - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .