Nikon ViewNX vs. Microsoft Expression Media
In digital photography, there's a concept called raw images. These raw images is the digital analogy of a film. Any information the camera captured during photo shooting is written to this file, no changes are made, that's why it's called raw.
The problem is, different camera vendors uses their own proprietary format. Consumer-level image processing software usually does not provide raw format reading, since they will need to pay for license to each of the camera vendors. Thus, we depend on camera vendors' bundled software (which usually very user unfriendly).
For my shots yesterday, I tried using Nikon's bundled ViewNX software to convert raw files to JPEG, which is the de-facto image format for the web. The problem with it is that it is very slow. I have only 51 raw files, to convert all of them to JPEG allows me to do my nightly chore (taking a bath, brush teeth, recharge my gadgets, etc.) plus some half an hour more.
Just now I remember, Microsoft Expression Studio bundled a media management software called, intuitively, Media. I browsed the Catalog Importers and found out that it capable of doing imports of Nikon raw images! I just now tried importing all my raw images, and it's completed in... 3 minutes! Now, that's what I call performance.
While it's true that raw image processing is more than just JPEG export, I do feel that speed is the ultimate quality aspect for users.
Nikon ViewNX is not without good thing to say though, best of all is that it's free (bundled with the camera), while Expression Media is US$199.