After weeks of looking at one, I finally decided to buy an official Madcatz Street Fighter 4 Fight Stick. Used a lot of Birthday money to buy it, but it should all be worth it.
 
Ive just started using it and it feel really weird, im having trouble pulling off what should be easy moves, guess it just takes time eh? Well hopefully ill get used to it soon, wanna get back to fighting dudes online again.
 
I guess its more of a necessity that I get better soon, cause there's a SF4 tournament being held in my city really soon (Sept 26) and I need to get my shit straight before I sign up.  
 
And if anyone plays SF4 on PS3 and wants to fight, lets go.

Cool, stick with it though (pun intended), it will probably take a while to get used to, especially (if) you started playing with a pad.  
 
Plasma's link is pretty useful too. 

Man, I really wish I had the dough to throw around on a good fight stick, but the decent ones are 160 bucks. Way out of my price range. Really wanted one of those limited edition street fighter ones at PAX...

Cool. I bought a stick a while ago but couldn't get used to it ( I didn't really try much). I'm sure if you put some effort in you will reap your rewards though ;) 
 
@Satune:
I'll add you. My PSN is mubress2.

Welcome to the club.

" I wanted to buy a TE stick the minuet SF IV came out but there were none available.  So i put a pre order in at EB and played the hell out of the game with the PS3 controller.  I got pretty good, being able to do all the moves 100% of the time, even harder moves like Cammy's hooligan throw.    Anyway two months later I got the stick and long and behold I sucked with it.  I remember using sticks in the arcade  for fighting games when I was younger, but this was the first time using a stick in a long time.  What really started to annoy me was getting online and having my ass handed to me by Ken scrubs I use to own becasue I couldn't get my moves off in time.    Anyway it doned on me that I would have to put in alot of quality time with my new stick (yea you heard me right) to get as good with it as I was with the PS3 controller, so long story short I sold it.  Sticks are not for everyone, I found out the hard way.  Edit We should scrap sometime, my PSN is MikeFIghtNight "

It took me almost three months to fully acclimate to playing on stick. The only thing that kept me going is that I knew there were Abel combos that are nearly impossible on pad, but very easy on stick.

Nice dude!

Sweet deal...I got my TE a month or so ago and swapped out the gate for an 8-way...absolutely loving it. Before that I had an old DOA4 stick that was lying around and I added Sanwa parts to it to hold me over since the game came out. I might have posted these before but they are from a while back (when I thought Sagat was the only fighter I was good with). 
 

I LOVE seeing any custom stick work.  I just uploaded a bunch of pics of different sticks my buddy and I have made to my profile, they are always a lot of fun!