As Paul says, there's really little comparison between leaving the RGB rendering and JPEG creation to the camera vs saving in RAW and doing the work yourself. In the event that you are in very "normal" light ... not too contrasty, not too dim, etc ... the results of creating a JPEG from RAW or letting the camera do it will be very close. However, your [EMAIL PROTECTED] image files don't have as much editing overhead available: they're much more likely to have problems with posterization, contrast, etc if they need any serious modification. As soon as lighting conditions become more stressed, as soon as you *need* the dynamic range of the sensor's 12bit per pixel capture, RAW and post-processing to [EMAIL PROTECTED] image files is the only way to go for maximum quality.
Regards the Pentax Lab software, I have it installed and used it as a test once. I suppose it can replicate the camera's JPEG rendering if you work at it, but why bother? I've been using Photoshop CS and Camera Raw v2.4 since I bought my DS (CR was in beta then) and am very satisfied with its rendering capabilities and workflow. Godfrey
