Came across a letterhead from the hardware store in the town I grew up in. The phone number was 2. (The letterhead was from before my time).

At least there was someone on the line to talk to.

He's right. Bodies are transient but lenses are forever. And it's the lens that makes the image. The body just interprets it.

The 600 is on my wish list.

I didn't either. (New guy here a little more than a week).

The website uglyhedgehog.com shows an abbreviated list of the forums with one entry at the bottom "All Sections". That's where you find the complete list of forums. (Fora?)

So looking at the list I note in the top banner that I have to "subscribe" to a forum. Presumably that will make it show up in the home page list. I'll have to try it.

[edit] I subscribed to one of the forums and now it shows up on the home page. And I unsubscribed to another forum and it disappeared from the home page.

One nice thing about digital pictures. Once you get past the capital cost of the camera and before you get to the printer, the pictures are free. Take a lot of them, vary the exposure. So what if 75% of them are over or underexposed. If you bracket enough you'll get some keepers.

So you don't shoot RAW?

Well, reading further, I see that you do sometimes.

As a LR user who uses the catalog as an essential aid to my aging memory, it's important that my shots be placed into the LR catalog. So I shoot RAW only, no jpg. That forces me to put the images into a converter and since I choose LR, I get the images in the catalog. And LR encourages me to put generic keywords on the block of images I import. I then use LR to do the triage and add appropriate keywords to individual images or blocks of images. Then I can do whatever editing is appropriate.

But the primary thing is the catalog. My memory used to be all on paper. Now it's digital. Too bad it's not biodigital (if that's a word).

I shoot a lot of events. I don't always have time to set up a shot, so there's always postprocessing to be done (not every shot, but a significant number of them). The output is used for journalistic purposes so it's not fine art and resolution is rarely an issue.

Sorry. I set the lens at 180 mm so with the TC20 the total is 360mm. Poor choice of words.

You might consider it a determining factor. I wouldn't consider it the only determining factor.

Personally, I'd recommend paying more attention to the lenses you buy than the bodies. If you're serious about photography, you WILL buy another body, since they're updated at 2-4 year intervals. On the other hand, lenses are updated at 2-4 decade intervals.

If you take reasonable care of them, lenses will hold value much longer than bodies. So if you get a good lens and lose interest in photography, you will be recoup a larger fraction of the original cost on your lenses than you would on your bodies. But if your interest grows, a good lens will be useful on a much improved body that you upgrade to at a later date. A cheap lens will be a mismatch to a highly capable body and you will have to upgrade your lens(es) also.

It's been a couple years now, but when I was running Vista I seem to recall that my copy of LR would create a DNG on import without having to run a separate NEF->DNG conversion program. What version LR are you running?

I did that with my first digital P&S. It quit. I took it to Best Buy. They looked at it and just let me pick out a new one. Didn't even try to repair it. But that's the last time I got an in-store warranty. It's also the last time I needed one.

Before CC I just downloaded the current version. I think I got a disk for LR3 but not for any others. They keep track of who registered their programs and if you lose it (disk crash or whatever) you can download it again. I don't have to worrry about finding that old disk. But you do have to keep track of your registration keys.

I'm assuming you're protecting your gear against accidents and the the "accidental coverage protection" is not to protect you against accidental coverage.

Most gear stores offer some sort of third party insurance. Most of it is not worth the money. I would ignore anything that costs more than 5% of the purchase price per year of coverage. And that assumes that the fine print doesn't exclude anything that has a reasonable probability of happening.

The fine print rules here. They should offer you a written sheet with the terms of the coverage and give you time to read it. Otherwise decline.

There are a lot of pixelated portraits of Lincoln. The one I was thinking of was really very few pixels. I found a picture of Lincoln in a top hat and tried to run it through Photoshop and the pixelation filter but wasn't able to get anything really recognizable. My memory was that the picture looked something like this, but it was more recognizable than my attempt. (This attempt has about 80 pixels).

I can see a guy in a top hat if I get about 15 feet away from my laptop, but it's not recognizably Lincoln. Original below my attempt.

I've been looking for one of those Lincoln pixel paintings for a while now. I found this one by Leon Harmon (Bell Labs, 1973) but I recall seeing one with even fewer pixels, like about 35 of them. The one I remember had Lincoln in a top hat. That one I haven't been able to find.

'Course it's always possible that my memory pixels have decreased significantly to the point that the resolution has become too low.

1.
Obviously, more pixels will give you more resolution. That assumes you do not go below the diffraction limit or the resolution limit of the lens you are using.

In terms of noise, larger pixels will collect more photons at a given light intensity. Since photons are basically counted, noise follows counting statistics, which basically state that the noise is the square root of the signal so the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is 1/(square root of the signal). When you count more photons the SNR gets larger.

So at a pixel level, larger pixels will do better than smaller pixels.

OTOH, at an image level, the total number of photons will be the same for two sensors with the same area but different pixel counts. So the noise will be the same, although you will have to downsample the higher pixel count image to compare it meaningfully to the other one.

This only considers the noise from counting statistics. There is additional noise from the analog to digital converters, so there is more of that for more pixels. However, that noise has been reduced to fairly small levels, so I wouldn't expect that to be significant unless there's a really large difference in pixel counts (like a factor of 10 or more).

2. I'll leave this part of your question to those who know more about camera anatomy.

Always nice to meet someone older than dirt!