True, true.... GIMP is also a nice alternative, and free at that. It definitely depends on what needs to be done. For that matter, Google's Picasa is a very nice tool to organize and do the most common photo "touch ups" in a very quick and user friendly shell. I, in fact, use this for most of my candid photos and such. I only move to more power when I need to do higher-end work as ironraven mentions.

Oh, and on AVIs... I know they take up a lot of room RIGHT NOW, but in 5 years, that will seem like nothing when we are all running multi-terabyte drives. We are almost to the point where we have single drives with terabyte capacities anyway. I built a 2TB RAID 5 array for under a $850. The advantage is that there is no compression. Sure, you could compress and store it under any number of formats... but you DO lose something and when your source is VHS in the first place... Well, I'll let you be the judge, but for archival puposes, I'm sticking with AVI. I figure 10 years down the road, I'll be glad I did. But I can see your point. If you want economy with minimal loss, you could compress those source files. Of course, if you could burn them off to a 50GB dual layer Blu-Ray disk as raw AVI, then that's an option too. I just think that's going to be fairly expensive for a couple of years.

And yeah, for all we know the next format may not be anything like HD-DVD/Blu-Ray.