Lightroom Vs. Aperture - mini shootout

As seen in my earlier thread, I've been playing with the 30 day trial of Lightroom trying to decide whether that tool is a better fit for my needs then Aperture.
While I've only spent a few hours with this on a small project I think I've been able to grasp some of the major elements of LR and I can compare them against aperture. I cannot say this is balanced or not, just my opinion.
User Interface
Both apps have very good but very different interfaces. I'm giving a slight edge to LR for its organization of tools but a nod to Aperture for its breadth. I think Aperture as a more rounded set of tools in the UI department. Take the loupe for instance, its better implemented in aperture. From what Ive read stacks are better also but I have yet to play with them in LR.
Workflow
LR imposes a more defined (but logical) workflow, i.e., Library module, develop module etc.
Aperture is more open ended, basically you can edit, categorize assign keywords in any order you wish
Give LR the win here but only slightly
Image adjustment
Lightroom has a more refined and robust set of editing tools. In this initial testing I've only worked on my images with default actions and LR seems to produce a more visually pleasing and accurate result. Can Aperture achieve the same level of work, I'm sure but it will take more fiddling. Can Lightroom produce even more stunning results I believe it can since Ive only played with the basic tools.
Organization
Aperture uses projects, folders, albums and smart albums.
Lightroom has folders which are logical and physical, collections(albumns). The physical organization of images occur within the app but its possible that they can get out of sync if a folder is moved in the finder.
Aperture wins on this this category, I use smart albums extensively and its really nice to set a keyword, say smugmug and have all images appear into an album (which I then export and upload to smugmug).
Performance.
Aperture runs ok most of the time on my machine, but its higher requirements locks out a lot of other machines and has bogged down on my from time to time (needlessly I might add).
Lightroom seems much more perky in interacting with the tools and images but Ill through out a little proviso, and that Im only dealing with a 100 images or so in LR and aperture has 10k. nonetheless performance is a common knock against aperture.
Printing
Ap had rudimentary printing at best
Lr has a much more flexible approach to printing but both still lack features and abilities that can be found in other apps like qimage
The winner?
Aperture Organization/categorization
LR won in Workflow, Image adjustment, performance.
Which one will I use, well I am leaning towards Lightroom but the most important area is image organization. All things being equal if I ned to spend most of my time trying to organize the images Im not sure this is the tools for me. Aperture lets me create a hierarchical structure very easily and with every shoot in a project its easy for me then to move on to image selection/keywords/editing. Its true the LR gave me better result out of the box but will it let me work the way I want to work thats the question.
BTW does anyone know when the introductory price goes away, that will also propel me into action.

A couple of additional shootout issues. The first one goes to Aperture, the second to Lightroom:
1. Aperture, it seems to me, makes better use of display real estate (and I'm not talking about multi-display support). I've been spending a lot of time recently exporting old projects from Aperture and importing them into LR folders. So I've been cmd-tabbing at high frequency between the two apps. I'm noticing that in aperture, my display feels bigger. No other way to describe it. (This is a G5 with a 23" cinema HD.) I think it has to do with the fact that in Aperture, interface element are more space efficient. lists tighter, Icons, tags, type all smaller and tighter, less space used dividing elements. And yet not feeling crowded or chaotic. LR has room for improvement in this area.
2. Lightroom, on the other hand, sports a different palpable advantage of it's own: Good Will. Now I'm a big Apple fan. I'm responsible for IT here and I've administered lots of Macs over the years (and a few PCs). I'm a shareholder even. I really believe Apple does great work, innovates in ways no other company is doing, builds great products and great user experiences. But you got to hand it to Adobe: By opening and sharing their development process with us, via the Labs site and the public beta program for LR and now PSCS3, and in a lot of other ways, they've converted a whole class of users into collaborators, and therefore stakeholders, in a way that Apple doesn't do. Where Apple keeps secrets to optimize the big product intro splash, Adobe is opening up to its customers in a variety of ways, creating an effective collaborative community. LR is a good example of the success of that approach. Apple has room for improvement in this area.
Tim Wilson
Studio Lab

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    Michael Winner wrote:
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    Try it. In my experience, if you work a little, Lightroom is quite a bit better. Once in a while I like the color rendition from Capture NX better (even when using the camera-matching profiles) but those are rare conditions.
    is it the proprietary RAW files from Nikon that are holding back some critical info that imporved the image?
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    tidysteve, I agree with you completely. Having used Lightroom for many months, and also Aperture for many months, I have to say that Aperture is by far the more mature program. It is simply not fair to say that Lightroom is a better program -- it is a very different program, to be sure, but certainly not a better one. It is less stable than Aperture, less fully featured. LR lacks the loupe, smart albums, and more seriously it lacks soft proofing -- an absolutely essential element for serious photographers.
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