iView had a huge head start, but when microsoft purchased them, they squandered what advantages iview had. Both Aperture and Lr have more features, and critical mass behind them. I don't see Expression Media becoming any real competition to either.
Agreed.
iView or Expression Media seems like a bloated solution to file management when 'the others' have been honing this as part of the feature set since day dot. It's pretty good as it stands, though I know Aperture could up the ante on stability with it's managed/referenced file crashes.
If Phase one were to integrate Expression into Capture One the first thing to do would be to head over to the Phase One user forums. Historically, there has been a lot of backlash from loyal users, especially when there was a jump from v3 to v4. They don't like their Capture software being messed with!
The point is that Capture One started life Primarily as professional capture software for Phase One's digital backs both in the Studio and on Location. Later on they started to include support for third party Raw capture, specifically from Canon (Tethered shooting) and Nikon (Import from Card) and then developed from there. The need for a managed library wasn't so important in the professional fashion and commercial market as jobs were shot, edited, processed, and delivered to the client all in one session. The next session would have always been a new job starting from a clean slate. New client, new session.
Apple recognised the need for an all in one solution for the professional portrait, wedding, events, user base, and created Aperture. Fundamentally a great solution for Mac users, even if you needed 'the most powerful computer the planet has ever seen' just to run version 1. Still, we're on v3 now and speed isn't really the issue any more.
And lightroom has the same approach - great Raw conversion/adjustments/asset management to enable workflow. Done.
The question isn't Aperture vs Lightroom? Aperture vs Capture One? or combinations of these. For most people it's Aperture
or Lightroom? If you're using one or the other there is a good chance that you won't want to migrate your extensive hard drive crippling photographic library to a new system in the vain hope that the exposure sliders work better in Program X. They might do, but it's a hell of a lot of bother to go through only to discover that you actually preferred the way that Program Y dealt with highlight recovery after all.
And when you get to the conclusion that neither program is more or less capable across a broad range of features and that we're only really discussing the justification of choice of software, it becomes a little bit like chatting about whether a foggy day is better than a misty morning. It's a bit dull.
