Sounds like we had a similar start, even including the break.
I think you will enjoy the possibilities presented by Raw capture. It's like taking control of your work in the darkroom all over again. Even my compact is set to Raw these days, I just would not do it any other way.
The only disadvantage as far as I can see is the need for more storage media, but hard drive space gets cheaper by the day and memory cards are much the same.
Don't get sucked into all the hype about memory card speed though. Most cameras cannot write to the card at the top speeds that expensive cards boast and I've never missed a picture because I was waiting for my card to download to my computer.
In fact, I usually convert my Raw files to DNG format on import so card speed is definitely not the bottleneck in my workflow.
When I tackled Canon about publishing the maximum write speeds for their cameras they admitted that my 6D could not out perform a Class 6 card, which sells at almost half the price of the current Class 10 cards, so you can save a lot of money if like me you are building a collection of them for working off grid.
Thanks for the advice mate
So far I've never needed anything more than the Sandisk Extreme 3 series which are nice and cheap. I can see me needing another hard drive soon but like you say they are getting cheaper.
RAW has been a complete eye opener to me. I chuckle at my own stupidity that i wouldn't think twice about spending over £1000 on a lens but i've waited 4 years before spending £100 of some software to deal with RAW files
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