[pmlnr]

Both me and my wife recently realized something: the JPEG produced by the Pentax cameras we own are 90% of the time better than what we achieve with hours of raw conversion tweaking.

Given that I'm not doing retouching most of the time, dealing with raw files becoming more and more a pain, without an actual gain.

Had anyone else thought about this?

[hultner]

I usually shoot to JPEG and RAW simultaneously. Most times I never touch the RAW file but in case I ever want they're there. Disk space is cheap nowadays so redundancy isn't a real problem for me anymore.

Haven't used a Pentax expect for my trusty K1000 so I don't know if they support that.

[pmlnr]

The higher end ones can - they even have an option to choose between PEF and DNG for RAW format.

This is what I'm doing as well, but the DNG files take 20-30MB of space, even at pathetically low 16MP (/s, high quality 2MP was enough for A4 prints...) resolution, and disk space is not THAT cheap once you want local and offsite backups as well.

[slantyyz]

>> the JPEG produced by the Pentax cameras we own are 90% of the time better than what we achieve with hours of raw conversion tweaking

Canon, Fuji and Olympus OOC JPEGs also have great reputations.

>> Given that I'm not doing retouching most of the time, dealing with raw files becoming more and more a pain, without an actual gain.

If you're not retouching, there probably is no point for you to edit RAW. I use RAW myself mainly to correct color temp and high iso noise reduction. The noise reduction in particular is useful for me because I prefer to use smaller sensor cameras.