Adobe CS3 Upgrade Price Variation Comes As Nasty Shock

Now I'm no artist (which is why I won't be entering Nokia's N76 design competition) but I do enjoy superimposing risqué slogans onto the clothes worn in vintage photographs; I make do with Paint.net, being a naive little bugger when it comes to Photoshop.  With the advent of Adobe's CS3, however, blogger/engineer/almost-inventor-of-the-webcam Quentin Stafford-Fraser was thinking about upgrading his old version, only to discover that the UK upgrade sold is around twice the price of the US copy.

Right now, pre-ordering the CS3 Premium package on Adobe's own US site will set you back $1,799, or $599 if you're upgrading from a previous copy.  In the UK, you'll be charged £1,655 for the full version and £546 for the upgrade; that works out to $3,271 and $1,079 respectively.

As Quentin points out, for that mark-up you could buy flights from the UK to New York, enjoy a long weekend in the Upper West Side, do some shopping – including CS3 – and come back with the same software.  His plans to do that and grab the US upgrade version were scuppered, however, with the news from commenter Claes-Frederik that Adobe won't allow you to upgrade UK software with a disk from another country.

Now us Brits are used to getting gouged when it comes to price mark-up – look at the PS3 debacle if you want another example – but this is frankly ridiculous.

Photoscam? [Status-Q]