The colour of the scan is not important. You could order a colour scan if needed. Plus there is NO index which may have justified the costs.
It is relevant because many of the greyscale scans from microfiche are often unreadable. There are numerous examples on ancestry of registers that are difficult or impossible to read in places because they were scanned from the poor quality microfilms/microfiche. In the case of colour scans, if the original register has faded, they are far easy to read. And that applies to some of the Essex parishes because I have copies of some on microfiche.
No there may not be an index, but then there aren't for most parish registers on microfiche. In any case, considering the omissions and glaring irregularities in many of ancestry's and FindMyPast's indexes, they can't be relied upon without necessarily double checking the originals anyway.
Yes, agreed can use the excuse that it costs more for a trip there, but in this modern day n age we do not need to. Thank goodness other counties do not feel the same way. Just seems to be the trend now to make as much money as possible. Am sure if the yearly/half yearly subs were lowered they would make a lot more money!
Hopefully freereg will get in there soon.... 
In an ideal word yes everything would be available digitally but it needs to be remembered that county Archives are public sector organisations and our council tax pays towards their upkeep and any costs they incur digitising the records. Ancestry, and to a lesser extent FindMyPast, have major gaps in quite a few of the parish register image sets and, in the case of ancestry, they are not interested in remedying the problems. At least with SEAX if you find a problem, they will normally address it.
As for freereg, even they say they are a finding aid and not to be relied on in its entirety because mistakes can be made. You can never be sure you have the correct family unless you check the transcripts against the original records, which means accessing them. There is no point trying to rely on everything that is free because you may not be following the correct families. As for using ancestry in your local library, that's fine if you can get to one and have use of a computer for sufficient time. It's not possible at all libraries and for all people.
As for dropping prices, I suspect they've not been making as much as they wanted or the prices wouldn't have necessarily gone up. Some people won't pay for anything anyway whatever the price is. There are numerous examples of lookup requests on RC from people who won't pay for the certificate even when it's a direct ancestor. It's all a matter of deciding what you spend your finite money on, everyone has different priorities when it comes to money for hobbies.
