Well, I made the jump yesterday. I sold all my canon SLR equipment, and am now shooting with a Fuji S5 Pro, which is based on the Nikon D200. No more 70-300 zoom. For now, 2 lenses, and 2 lenses only:

Nikon 50mm f/1.8 (still deciding if I like this)
Zeiss 35mm f/2 (On order)

That will get me an equivalent field-of-view of 53mm and 75mm, due to the 1.5x crop factor. The S5 is light-years faster then the S3, even when shooting Raw and set with Dynamic Range to Auto. This allows you to recover highlights that would otherwise be done for on a normal CCD or CMOS sensor. It’s pretty unique stuff.

Noise-wise, it seems better then the Rebel, which is good. As long as it gets me from 800 -> 1600, between that and the fast primes, I should be in pretty good shape. It does do up to ISO 3200, but it’s very noisy there, as would be expected.

The only downside is it has 30,000 shutter actuations, which is higher then I would have expected for the price I paid, but it’s clean, and has a 2 year extended Mack warranty on it too, which I don’t think I could have bought if I got one off EBay.

Next items will be the 70-300 zoom, and possibly the Kodak SLR/n.

Here’s some sample output from the Fuji with the Nikon f/1.8:

Flower shot re-creation attempt