When "fresh" isn't better...

Typically I'm a huge proponent of fresh (or even quality frozen) over canned.

The lone exception: tomatoes out of season. A good canned tomato beats a Styrofoam, strip-mined tomato anytime.

There's always an arsenal of canned tomato varieties in my pantry, from whole to sliced to diced. They're versatile. They also take me back to the days when I was a kid and we canned hundreds of quarts of tomatoes every summer. The taste isn't quite the same, but the convenience sure is.