Why I buy this one ?
- The ideal solution for creating pages for print, designing pages for the web and mobile devices, editing photos, and creating illustrations
- Deliver innovative ideas in print, web, and mobile design
- Enjoy a unified, integrated design experience with new self-adjusting panels and other shared interface elements for maximum productivity
- Combines full new versions of Adobe InDesign CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Illustrator CS3, Flash CS3 Professional, Dreamweaver CS3, and Acrobat 8 Professional
- Combines all-new versions of essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment

Amazon.com offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $583.49 Usually ships in 24 hours

ReStockIt offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $637.01 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

--caiman-- from FL, United States offers this stuff for:

Price : $690.72 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

ANTOnline offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $696.29 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Midway offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $701.96 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Technology Galaxy offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $716.49 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Checkout Software offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $827.44 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Trinity Omega offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $899.99 Usually ships in 2-3 weeks

What our customer's say!

"Good upgrade!", Great software. I give it 4 stars because Bridge is a bit CPU hungry and has some bugs. But looks like Adobe keeps fixing them so it seams working smoother after few updates. As usually a great upgrade and I love using all the programs.

"Watch Out!", Be careful!

Adobe seems to have gone out of their way to infuriate their long time customers through an arcane, illogical and ultimately deceptive upgrade offer. You can spend hours on their website trying to make sure that you have the required products for an upgrade. Besides the obvious CS1 and CS2 versions that will let you successfully install CS3, you see listed everywhere you can upgrade from Macromedia's Studio MX or Studio 8 all over their website and marketing materials. Well, guess what? If you buy any of the print focused CS3 Design Suites you can't use the Studio MX or 8 serial numbers! After a long phone call with a polite Adobe rep who had to spend quite a bit of time himself checking with others to make sure the information was right, I was told that the ONLY CS3 upgrade package that will work with the Studio serial numbers are the CS3 Web Design packages. Not the regular print focused Design packages.

By the time I got off the phone I was totally perplexed at their lack of logic not allowing Macromedia Studio customers who use Freehand to upgrade to a product that has Illustrator included. If you buy CS3 Design Standard or Premium and expect to upgrade from a Macromedia Studio package you can get stuck with an unusable upgrade that costs nearly $400.

I've been working with Adobe's products for since beta testing version .7 of Illustrator over 20 years ago. Obviously, I've been a supporter of them for a very long time. Today I walked away from Adobe furious.

"Excellent Upgrade", I cannot emphasize how much easier it has become to navigate The Creative Suite interface. The UI has evolved into one that is both clean and attractive, while becoming much more customizable. CS3 offers much better integration between applications and has some really cool new additions.

"Overpromised, Underdelivered", I was hoping Adobe would fix a lot of the bugs in Dreamweaver (especially, the horrible slowness on the Mac platform) but it seems they ignored Dreamweaver altogether and focused on redoing their own products.

Avoid if you can.

"An expensive cumbersome pig of a product", I am a professional illustrator/designer/web developer and have been an Adobe fan since I discovered Photoshop (2.5?!) in high school. But lately, Adobe has given me a lot less to love, starting with the intrusive online activation of CS2, PDF overhead, and Adobe's sloppy followup to the Flash player (9 fails to install on a lot of people's OS X).

CS3, in similar fashion, seems slapdash. Photoshop and Illustrator are Adobe's cash cows, and CS3 feels like a rushed product to squeeze money out of designers. It's a PIG! It took 45 minutes to install Design Premium on my Quad Core workstation at the office. It loads slower than CS2 and takes up more resources. After opening Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash to see what Adobe changed, I promptly went back to using CS2 and never used CS3 again. I didn't see any compelling reason to switch, or relearn the interface, as Adobe seems to require you to do every new version.

I had low expectations for CS3, as I'm usually skeptical of new product releases. This perception of cash milking wasn't helped by the fact that Adobe confusingly split the line into 6 packages. Now you have to decide which version fits you. You may end up paying for something you don't need, or want one piece of software that's in another package. You can't save some money by removing something you don't want, or adding something that you do.

One bright light I was holding onto was the possibility of Flash being better integrated with the Adobe interface and workflow. One of the most annoying things about Flash was its unfailing ability to paste shapes and gradients from Illustrator all messed up. Gradients end up as bitmaps, curves get bent, and complex shapes just seem to make Flash choke. Importing from Flash into Illustrator via cut & paste would result in similar disasters.

I was also hoping for an Illustrator-styled gradient tool (drag a line from the start point to the end point to paint the object), instead of Flash's bizarre and cumbersome one where you have to rotate a circle for radial grads, or sandwich lines for linear grads. I didn't test out CS3's cut & paste compatibility, but sadly, the interface was not integrated. It's the same old Macromedia styled tools.

As for Dreamweaver being added here, that's much like every new version of Microsoft Office that comes out each year. Do you really care? It's an HTML editor, for Pete's sake. How much improvement can you make on what is essentially a text editor? For people who handcode, you can stick w/ your old DW... or GASP! Notepad.

For me, I'll continue to use CS and CS2. Personally, I see absolutely no reason for this upgrade, except to reward Adobe for a lackluster and, what I feel, is an unfinished product. It feels very much like an early-adopter product. CS just keeps getting bigger and bigger with each version, but not more stable, dangerously approaching the point of bloatware. If it's all a suite and integrated, why the need for 4 gigs of space to install? Shouldn't many components be shared between all the products, and result in less memory/hard drive use? 700+ megs for Acrobat?! Like others have said, wait for CS4 when they actually might integrate the Macromedia products properly.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Great Purchase", I have been using Adobe products for over 13 years and have to say this is one of the best upgrades I have seen from them. The new workspace and GUI of Photoshop seems to just get out of your way so you can work. Illustrator starts up a great deal faster then previous versions and the color guide is a great asset for color-challenged designers like myself. I would have purchased for just those two programs, but they also throw in a new inDesign, Dreamweaver and Flash. However, I do miss Imageready.

"Great upgrade", I love that is comes with Dreamweaver, and Flash now and things are more integrated. I think the price is pretty high though. Plus, I think if you owned CS2 Premium the upgrade price should have been cheaper than those who owned CS2 Standard. I mainly got it for Photoshop extended features in 3D and more + Dreamweaver, and Flash. If you don't need those apps or the extra features in the PS extended then you could probably wait till the next upgrade.

Also a plus is that CS3 is now Universal. I have a G4 PPC, but hope to change to an Intel when possible.

"Not up to snuff", As a graphic designer I've been happily using adobe products since 1990. The latest release, Creative Suite 3, is an uncharacteristic exception. Acrobat locks my machine and I haven't been able to open a .pdf file successfully yet since installing CS3 (had to uninstall the Acrobat App). Photoshop is very slow with odd periodic freezes for no apparent reason and crashes frequenty. They've also messed up some of the refined workflow within the interface. Flash takes far to long to start up. Overall I'm more happy with prior versions and much more productive with them. The only positive note so far is the ability to copy vector files cleanly and accurately into Flash from Illustrator. I wouldn't recommend this product in it's current state.

"CS3 fails to deliver promised integration", I'm a long-time fan of Adobe, and eagerly anticipated CS3. I hoped they would work out the many Macromedia bugs, but they managed to add a few of their own! And the promised product integration simply isn't there:

The Dreamweaver inteface is unchanged, except for renaming the Layers panel, and adding a new Objects tab. It won't correctly display interactivity in a SWF preview (the first click works; subsequent click are treated as a right-click, showing the FlashPlayer drop-down menu rather than the functionality in the SWF!)

Photoshop may be the reason most people upgrade, but its most touted new feature--non-destructive filters--is implemented very poorly. Rather than working like adjustment layers currently work, SmartFilters, as they are known, convert the underlying Photoshop layer into a SmartObject and places the SmartFilter on top. You CS2 users know that you can't edit a SmartObject in Photoshop--you have to go to the object's native application. So to edit the image under a SmartFilter, Photoshop opens it in a new document window (meaning you can't see its interaction with layers underneath as you edit it, and can't see how the various SmartFilters make the changed composition look until you save and return to the original document.

Flash was the reason I purchased this upgade: I was elated about importing layered PSDs and AI files. PSDs work great; AI files cause Flash to crash! (and Adobe tech support will not even respond)

Flash added a couple of new tools: shape primitives, which came from Macromedia Freehand: they allow you to easily edit the corner radius of a rectangle long after it's drawn--even editing each corner independently!
But do they offer a Primitive Star or Polygon tool like Freehand had (which allows you to edit the number of sides on stars and polygons)?
No.

Are the new Primitive Shape tools in Illustrator or Photoshop?
No.

Are the tear-off tool sets from Illustrator and ImageReady CS2 in Photoshop or InDesign CS3?
No.

Speaking of ImageReady, does it exist anymore?
No.

Can Photoshop CS3 open and edit multiple frames of an animated GIF?
No!(Don't delete ImageReady from your hard drive yet!)

Can you move the new collapsable tool panels onto your second monitor?
No.

Does Flash correctly auto-format ActionScript?
No.

Can you open an InDesign CS3 document in CS2 if no CS3 features were used (would be useful for all the non-early-adopters, such as printers receiving the jobs files)?
No.

Can you open a Flash CS3 .FLA with Flash 8, even if no CS3 features were used?
No.

Should you buy CS3?
No.
Not even at the academic price. It's a beta-version at best; wait for CS4.

UPDATE: A week later I'm STILL waiting for Adobe's reply, even after opening a second support case! It's like they outsourced their software development and support to Microsoft.

"Wait for the upgrade!", Don't be fooled. This product is very buggy. Flash crashes often, especially when the debugger is on. Photoshop often hangs for no apparent reason and decides to come back to life after 60 seconds or so. All suite apps are extreeeeeemly slow at start up. The performance enhancements you got from you Mac Intel are once again devoured by a behemoth software package. Maybe it attemps to be too many things for too many people. Adobe competes with Microsoft for the bloatware award.