The D70 is a very nice camera. I am a bit of a Nikon slut. But if you can afford it take the step to the Dqx. They are going to come down in price with the introduction of the D2X. The additional features better software and mechanical shutter is worth the extra money.

I spend more on film in a year than I did on my camera easily

I think the math prolly depends on what you're doing and where your skills lie.

Working backwards...

Big prints done on lightwriter come from digital. if you're shooting digital, you're all set = $0, or perhaps a quick pass through photoshop = near $0. If you're shooting film, you have to develop, print, scan, and setup, which is a hefty cost. These are lab work either way so the printing costs are identical - once you get the film shots into digital format.

If you're publishing magazines, papers, doing layout, or web work, you prolly want your work in digital format, in fact, about the only time I can see that you might not want digital is for fine art. Or if your 35mm is clean enough to blow up as is and you want those prints.

Digital domain isn't cheap to blow up just yet. 8 megapixel seems to do 8x10 ok and the few I've blown to 10x15 look fine to me. But we likely have different tolerances and criterion here. You may not be happy with 8Mpixel at 8x10. In which case your digital cameras would be pretty significantly expensive.

Me, I'm a computer engineer. Anything in the digital domain is MINE. I have total control and near trivial access. I've always hated film. Expensive to buy, tedious to develop, it never comes out right, no backups, you can't do it a second time, post processing is a royal pain, etc.

I tripped my shutter about 15k times in the last 6 weeks. Of those, I printed maybe 500 4x6 prints around the corner for $.25 each and another 30 or so 8x10's for about $5 each. About 2k of those shots will go onto dvd, some others onto web sites, and I'll be producing cd's for all the models at about $.50/cd, and some others I've already shipped by email for essentially no additional cost beyond my standard overhead. Canon 20d cost ~$1500, my 4g microdrive cost $160. Lens cost is a wash because you'd mostly use the same lenses for film or digital, right? Call it $500 in printing costs & $2k in camera equipment.

What's a comparable film camera cost? $700? Ok, so you'd be $1300 ahead on the equipment. But then, 15k shots, call it, what? 20 shots per roll, at ~$10/roll+processing? I count that in at around $7500, not to mention storage and filing costs for all those useless prints, negatives, etc. And we haven't even started talking about scanning costs, prep for cd, for dvd, or for web.

That's how it's cheaper for me anyway.