It's an improvement, but not enough to keep me from investing in LR 1.0 (my 30 days ends tomorrow, so this was timely)

The major improvements I see initially are....

Cropping now shows as a box in all thumbnails and the editing windows shows only the cropped image.

NR is now on a separate tab and configurable per image.

You can open the tool pallette in thumbnail view and make changes to selected groups of images right in the thumbnail view. Sweet.

It still has too many UI quirks to be really useful and still lacks straightening, vignetting and captioning. If those were included I would REALLY consider using it instead of LR.

good to know, but LR is far more than just a RAW converter

I know, but I haven't fully utilized the DAM capabilities until I was sure I was ready to invest in it. I've been using it as a glorified DPP so far and was a little put off when they took out the Photo Binder capabilities.

The print color management doesn't want to play well with my Canon printer either.

BUT... It's pretty darn good for a 1.0, so I'm in while the introductory price is valid. Adobe has a good track record of improving products.

yeah time to invest in all of its glory I highly reccommend the Luminous Landscape tutorial, quite boring but very detailed in all it can do.

Printing should be easy, its just select the appropiate ICC profile and turn off color management in the printer driver. Nothing else to it

Is DPP 3.0 pretty fast? At least compared to Aperture/Lightroom/Bridge?

Don't know about Aperture, but it's faster than LR - much faster than DPP2.2 and now faster than BBPro. It's a shame it's got the DAM limitations and UI issues... I love its skin tones conversions and color accuracy overall.

DPP is really all I have ever used for RAW. I briefly tried to use Photoshop CS2 but my files always looked strange.

I am definably looking into the new version.

DPP has always bothered me for some reason. i have used lightroom since it was in early beta, and I LOVE IT. Recently purchased it and I'm very happy with LR 1.0. Probably will never touch DPP again.