[matthew]

I have to admit that I'm really looking forward to a high-resolution sensor. I've wanted one several times, for the usual reasons:

Large prints. I now own an Epson 3880 printer, and 12Mpx really isn't enough to do a 16x20" at the quality level that I want. Even 12x18" is pushing it for me. I want to be able to stand right up to a print regardless of its size – what's the point of printing it bigger if there's nothing more to see? And for evaluating my own work, I'll use the same 5x loupe that I'll use to look at medium format negatives. And, to complete the thought, making big prints is why I started using medium format in the first place.

Heavy cropping. I use a tilt-shift lens for a lot of the digital photos that I want to reproduce, which introduces heavy (and absolute) vignetting when it's shifted to its limits. The only way to remove this is to crop. I've had some of these photos printed beyond 20x30 for store displays, and six or seven megapixels isn't where I want to be. Rather than a 36Mpx 36x24mm sensor, a 24Mpx 1.5 crop would actually be better for this, but I'm not complaining.

And yes, I'm now queueing up for a D800, no matter how unhappy that makes my 2006 iMac.