I had a Canon 5D Mark III on pre-order until Canon published it's extortion prices for the upgrade.

I ended up rather investing the same money in Festools (bought MFT/3 + CMS-GE + CMS-TS55 + CMS-OF + CTL26AC) 

Nevertheless, I've been reading on the reviews trickling in now that the production models are hitting bloggers hands and since we have had some enlightening threads on photography in general I thought to see if someone had taken the plunge and gotten other expensive toys outside of Festoys?   

I've been tempted by the 5D many times - but just don't feel I take photography seriously enough to have it on hand when I'm out and about.

Most of the images I capture are on my iPhone these days - simply because it's always with me.

It still surprises me how this specific area of tech doesn't seem to follow other tech pricing trends (my impression anyway).

I have an 800E on order..

I had the D800 and D4 on order at B&H, but decided to cancel them.
I have a D700 and decided for now it works fine for my purposes.

It's true, $3000 in Festool will be worth much more than $3000 in Canon or Nikon 5 years from now.
In ten years when your DSLR is a doorstop the festool will still be making money and worth something 

I'm sort of on the fence on that one. I like to skip a generation or even two before doing an upgrade. 7D I put at only about 0.7 generations behind the 5DIII. I realize the sensor size makes it harder to compare the two, but...

Considering the high price too and I don't think I'd do it.

I'd rather have a Hammer A3-31 or some nice bandsaw. The lifetime of these tools is far greater than a camera.

I am seriously considering the 5D MkIII.
I currently have a 50D and a heap of "L" lenses so the upgrade would be worthwhile.

I just wish they would offer it without video to reduce the cost.

Cheers.

For me it would simply be about going to a full sensor rather than crop.

Oh, and the sorry thruth is that about 9/10 pictures that I take nowadays happens on my iPhone 4S just because I have it always in my pocket... Duh!

Interesting discussion.  Since I switched to Nikon several years ago (during the 1DIII focus fiasco) I've been reading Thom Hogan (www.bythom.com) who offers a lot of good thinking, mostly Nikon oriented. 

He recently wrote about the idea that being "locked into" a particular system due to a collection of lenses and accessories is a bit misleading, particularly when you have used the system for a period of years or decades (high frequency switching is another matter).  This was pretty much my experience when I made the switch, yes I took a hit on my Canon gear (and I still miss my 400/5.6 which still doesn't exist for Nikon) but I had used the system extensively for many years, so the annual cost of ownership was quite reasonable.  Switching also gave me a chance to reconsider my choices of bodies and lenses based on 20+ years of experience and with a fairly good idea of what and how I would be shooting.  So while switching is a bit daunting and you will likely end up with fewer bodies and lenses in the new system  (at least to begin with) it is certainly feasible.

Another school of thought is to keep a foot in both camps and enjoy the best features of each system.  I like this idea but it isn't practical for me because a lot of my shooting is on trips, and when traveling by air, motorcycle or bicycle it is hard enough to manage one system, two would be out of the question.  But in a studio or even when traveling by car I could see it working quite well.

Over on www.naturescapes.net E.J. Peiker is moving from a D3X + D700 (I think) to a D800 + D800E for a blend of landscape and wildlife (he is a duck expert, among other things).  One of his ideas is to use the D800 in crop mode for wildlife – this uses the sweet spot of the lens and reduces the file size, although it doesn't increase the frame rate as far as I know. 

To me this seems like an excellent plan, he gets the 36MP without anti-aliasing when he needs it (almost MF performance), he has two bodies with the same interface that share batteries, brackets accessories, etc., they are lighter and cheaper than the D3X or anything comparable, choice of CF or SD media (he likes SD because his laptop has a built-in reader so he doesn't need to bring one), a vast selection of Nikkor F-mount lenses going back to the 1950s (obviously with limitations on the older ones) plus many third party lenses.  Throw in the excellent Nikon flash system and I think it is a winner.

And yes I am a bit of a fan boy, but I am sticking with my D300 + D3S for now.

Jeff

I'm actually currently looking at the Panasonic GX1 with the folding power zoom 14-42 lens for a travel camera, because I find myself leaving my 5D mark II way too often home because of it's size :-(

Another potential option would be the new Sony RX100 spec wise, but haven't had a chanse to hold it in my hand to see how it feels.

Well, that's the dilemma Kev - a Nex-7 with it's non-folding lens is just as bulky as my 5Dm2 with a 50mm/f1.4 that's always on it so it's not any smaller than my current camera. Megapixels seriously don't matter above about 10MP so I sort of don't crave the 24MP sensor of the Nex - actually it's getting to the point of making photo editing a pain even with my 21MP RAW files from my Canon... And that's on a quad-core CPU with CUDA acceleration for PS5.5 and 8GB of RAM... every action just takes that irritating extra 5s of waiting before anything happens. Heck even scrolling through my Lightroom 4 catalogue needs a 10-15s refresh time every other page of thumbnails which seriously kills my willingness to make photobooks out of my pics. I wish I could afford a fully loaded MacPro 

I've even looked at the new 40mm Canon pancake lens, but just the 5D body is too large to carry everywhere with me.

The RX100 is supposed to be the best thing after sliced bread in pocketable cameras, but don't know before I've seen it IRL. It's supposedly about the same size (effectively) as the Panasonic GX1 + the new 14-42mm power zoom lens - so not exactly pocketable, but still something you can carry nicely in a belt holster.

From a size & feature point of view the Canon S100 is actually just about optimal - it just suffers from a ridiculously small sensor... Now if Canon upgraded the sensor of it to the G1X's sensor and manage to keep the size similar for the S110 that would make it very interesting.

Would love to have something the size of a Canon S100 with atleast an APS-C size sensor for low light quality, DSLR handling responsiveness (i.e. no start up time or lag anywhere), a fast lens f/1.4-f/2.8 throughout the whole zoom range (ideally a constant max. aperture throughout the range) of 24-100mm 35mm equivalent and manual controls + RAW shooting. Dream on... 

I take most of my pics nowadays on my iPhone just because it's always on me.

With all the crap happening here at Nokia HQ (literally 2km from here) thanks to Stephen Elop (massive layoffs last week, killing of Maemo, going crappy WIndows Phone OS) I'm boycotting Nokia for the forseeable future.