sirhibernac, I agree that it is not exactly fair to have to pay so much so soon for the next upgrade of PS CS. However, reading some of the information on the new Photoshop bridge application and the ability to offload a lot of what irritates me with the current Photoshop file browser (rebuilding thumbnails and batching of raw conversions) into a background task is quite valuable. Added to the fact I have had my copy of PS CS over a year now so the upgrade cost is less painful to swallow.
The new Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge instead of File Browser sound like interesting features.
But I don't need the ability to edit 32 bit per channel images, noise reduction (I bet it's not going to be as sophisticated as Neat Image, which I already have), I don't need a red eye reduction tool, as a photographer I'm not interested at all in the new vector graphics features, and I don't have any complaints about the speed of the current version.
I don't see a killer feature yet that convinces me to pay € 213 ($ 277 - yes, that's what it costs in rip-off Europe! ) for the upgrade.
Putting cropping in the RAW convertor, improving the file browser, and adding hopefully decent noise reduction would be worth the upgrade to me. I was about to go buy noise ninja for what $50, if CS2 can do it then that's better value for me.
I've been using version 7.0, bypassing CS1. CS2 sounds like the deal for me. Having just purchased a 20D, doing more photos in 16 bit and the new features, makes it a certain purchase. Now just gotta wait for it's release
) for the upgrade.