Following Ruchai's wonderful picture and Duncans comment I decided to do a comparison. The weather here is dull, cold and wet, so it was a workshop and flash thing. Afraid no fancy butterflies or food shot this time.
The main subject is a milling tool I made up to allow me to shape the covers on my ML7 model. I added a bit of colour and a vernier for fine detail to allow the differences to show up.
I have never used JPG Basic before so thought it would be interesing. Certainly if you shoot a lot of RAW I can see merit in Ruchai's method of saving RAW + JPG Basic to speed up sorting ' wheat from chaff '.
I have been doing a bit of a web trawl and there does appear to be differences in how camera's process data off the sensor. Within the Nikon brand for instance the degree of in camera processing of JPG's is different depending on the target market for the camera.
So these results may be specific to the D100. The pictures were taken one after the other at the same camera settings of 1/160 @ f16
The attached composites have not been processed other than to convert the RAW image. The softness at this stage is a D100 thing.
Don