FZ200 - SOOC RAW vs JPEG comparison... very close!

I'm a bit puzzled here. Are you guys looking at full-size images somewhere? What I see are approximately 7"x10" images on my HD monitor, and a slightly larger maximum size on Rudy's gallery page.

At A4 size one could compare a $500 P&S with a $20,000 MFDB and maybe not notice much difference.

As I understand, the main advantage in shooting RAW comes into play when the camera's jpeg settings are not ideal for a particular shot. If the in-camera processing results in blown highlights, for example, then you are stuffed if you haven't got a RAW image to work on.

Once the highlights are blown, they're blown and no detail can be recovered. However, with a RAW image there's always a certain degree of latitude for recovering highlight detail with a good RAW converter, using the exposure control or highlight recovery sliders, whatever.