> > > We've also seen people say that in-camera JPEG seems to be > > comparable in quality to JPEGs produced from raw files by Photo > > Laboratory. > > We have? Where?
Well, there have certainly been posts to this list from people who have tried both raw and jpeg mode, and decided the differences were insignificant for the use to which they intended to put the images. > dpreview.com clearly shows that they are different, and my experiences > do as well. Look at the bottom of > http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxistd/page14.asp Photo Laboratory appears to sharpen more. But it also seems to produce slightly less noisy images than the in-camera JPEG conversion, even though it also seems to have a slightly higher contrast setting. So, if anything, Photo Laboratory can do a better job than in-camera. (Not surprising; it has rather more resources to apply to the problem). That definitely seems to tilt the balance further towards RAW mode :-( The RAW colour fringing noted in the dpreview.com comparison is slightly worrying. I wonder if this is also present in in-camera images, but is being masked by JPEG compression? This is exactly the sort of detail that can be lost during JPEG processing. It's time to look at a few in-camera TIFF images, I guess.
