Brian, come on, I know you're not trying to start a war.

To answer your question, I don't look at image quality quite the same as the testers out on the web. All those graphs and charts are only part of the equation.

In over 10,000 frames shot with my D100s, I had an occassional image that would WOW me, a shot where sharpness, detail and color all came together to really impress me in their quality. In the 5,000 frames shot with my 10D I have had very few shots that DIDN'T wow me in that manner. And that is how I judge the quality. I am getting from JPG files what I would get from a NEF files with plenty of post-processing.

As for flash, the Canon flash system is stupid, but it's more consistent than the D100/SB-28. The Nikon was easy in that you would just point and shoot, but exposures were all over the place. Canon makes you keep a focus point on the subject, which limits framing possibilities, but exposure is much more consistent. And due to the positioning of the 7 AF points, I still have some flexibility in framing, but not as much as I would like. The i-TTL system is supposedly greatly improved, and the E-TTL II is supposed to rid us of the AF point tether. Both are great for everyone.

As for noise, once again the charts and graphs are different from everyday shooting. Look at the D2h, it actually has LESS noise than the Canon 1D numerically, but look at the image comparisions and download samples, and in almost every shot the 1D looks better. That took me a long time to swallow, and in the end was part of the reason behind my switch. But my point is, at ISO 100 I have no noise, none. When I first got the 10D I took some shots with some deep shadow and brought the levels ALL the way up. The shadows had no noise. ISO 400 looks like my D100's ISO 200. Overall the colors are more saturated and I think the skin tones are much more natural. Overall, when I look at both my libraries of images, the ones taken with the Canon and the ones with the Nikon, I think the majority of Canon images looks far better in every way than the majority of the D100 images.

That being said, the D70 improved a lot. The noise still is higher than the D100, but like you said its quality has improved, so it looks better. That happens even though the weak AA filter has increased the numerical amount of noise. The meter is more consistent, but due to some sort of software crippling, it seems to be inconsistent when directly compared to the F5 meter. People are speculating that the brains behind the meter are not the same as the F5/D1/D2 series, and therefore gives different results. Meaning that it it's not the same performance wise, just part-wise, but still an improvement over the multi-area matrix.

I'm just saying all this to give my side of the story. Look around and you'll see that you didn't even need to defend your camera, because I promote it quite a bit on this site, it is an EXCELLENT camera, especially for the price. But in the end, I look at the D70 images and they look like D100 images, except with more detail and nicer noise, but they just don't wow me like Canon images do. I never believed it when Canon users trumpeted the CMOS buttery smooth imgage quality, but it took only a few thousand images to convince me it was true, at least to me.

I am sold on Canon, no matter how frustrating their cameras are, Nikon has some work to do for me to ever look at their images the same way again. The only camera that comes close IMO is the D1H, because its relatively low resolution and huge photosites gives it such smooth and saturated images.

Hope you see where I'm coming from. Take care and keep those awesome pictures coming.