DxO is currently marketing both the new Nik Collection and Photolab 2.3 Essential for a price of 99.99€ each. On the other hand, they say that the new Nik Collection contains a Photolab 2.3 Essential license, so that it doesn’t seem to make sense to buy Photolab 2.3 Essential alone.
Also, having bought a Photolab 2 Essential license (without Nik Collection) last December for 99.99€ it seems that I made a really bad deal.
Can someone, favorably from the DxO team, expalin this seemingly strange marketing policy?
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Sometimes there are real opportunities to get great deals. People with a Nik license v1 who didn’t have PhotoLab at all are paying just €50 for their update to v2 and get PhotoLab Essentials 2 for free. That’s an incredible deal. As I owned Elite and Nik v1, I don’t get that great deal.
The great deal right now for you during the Nik v2 launch is upgrading your PhotoLab Essentials to Elite for €50.
When updating to Nik v2, I took the opportunity to add a second PhotoLab Elite license which I can lend out to a collaborator or a colleague if we’re working on a photo project together. I’m not happy about it (I don’t urgently need that second license now) but there’s some value in it.
I agree that there are two good deals out there.
Only for someone who owns a Photolab 2 license and would like to have NIK as well the offer is unattractive and illogical, to say the least.
Anyway, since the old version of NIK is still freely available in the web and seems to work reasonably well for most purposes, this may not be so essential, so for now using the old NIK is my solution.
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I really understand your point of view and certainly can not criticize it. For me continued ongoing support of DXO is a good use of my money, even for less than stellar upgrades, if it will help ensure there will be a PhotoLab 3 and a Nik Collection 3.
Consider how important DXO’s software is to your workflow. If it is important, consider how you would feel if it was no longer available and not being upgraded at all. DXO’s financial condition was very tenuous last year and they may still be facing extreme financial pressures. If a small investment in their upgrades helps to secure my long term commitment to their software, it’s worth every penny to me.
Mark
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Interesting point, I didn’t know of financial problems. But looking at the comments the current pricing for NIK received in DPreview and also in the DxO-Forums it is clear that they have damaged the trust of their loyal customers. Maybe a crowdfunding drive would have been the better alternative.
I am curious how much they will charge for the coming upgrade to version 3.
Anyway, to do my part I upgraded to Elite using the current offer, although I don’t really know whether I will actually need the dehazing and denoising capabilities.
Try these features out, Rainer, on a number of appropriate images - - I’m confident that you’ll be very impressed.
John M
Rainer - try “Clear View” on a your files and have a look at DXO academy
That’s interesting because ClearView Plus and PRIME NR are two of PhotoLab Elites most important features, I take a lot of low light and high ISO images and would not want to be without PRIME. In fact I also use it often on lower ISO images to clean up noise resulting from detail retrieval from deep shadow areas.
Mark