Is there any point to start a GPU mining operation at this time?

[FrogBBQ]

Being months away from the release of ASIC mining rigs (i.e., BTCFPGA, Butterfly labs, Avalon) which will allow (i) a significant increase in Mhs/$, (ii) the correlated difficulty increase and (iii) the halving of the block size (from 50 to 25 around December 2012), is there any point for GPU miners to keep mining bitcoins at a loss?

Sure, there is still a few months of happy mining but once the projected 75TH/s of hardware will be running in the first half of 2013 (outpacing the current ~20-25TH/s), the difficulty will be so ridiculously high (over 10-20 million) that anything less than 50GH/s combined with a decent power consumption will be of little value.

Is there any solid arguments against this? 

In advance, thank you for sharing your opinions.

[tHash]

If you have hardware already, no reason not to mine with it for the time being.   

If you purchase new hardware, it will never pay for itself, so don't . . .

[retrapher]

Can it pay for itself if you sell the graphics cards at the end and keep the rest as a personal computer?

[FrogBBQ]

I do not think that this may offset your electricity bill though. Getting bitcoin at a loss is not a viable option I would think, especially if it is cheaper just to buy them with cash.

In the end, mining is only an infinitesimal part of the bitcoin economy. It is one way, and there is obviously many others, to get this currency to do something with it.

[almwaysa]

Use gpus for gaming
I am not a fan of buying gpus exclusively for mining, they have other uses

[bitcoinik]

I'm glad this subject was brought up. I've been looking at mining and it seems better off if I just stick with obtaining my Bitcoins with cash.

[safadosotherson]

I'm glad this subject was brought up. I've been looking at mining and it seems better off if I just stick with obtaining my Bitcoins with cash.

Agreed.