I have found this to be quite interesting and decided to do another image with colour in case any differences showed up there.
The chosen subject was a toasted bacon and tomato sandwich ( Duncan influence here ) .... but .... I ate it during the set up.
Moral appears to be have a good breakfast before using food as a subject.
So I decided to look a DP Review as now no bacon left.
As the timeline of digital development I looked at and compared the D100, D70, and D50 as they are all around 6 megapixels.
There is in each case a difference between RAW and JPEG but as time has moved on so the differences have become less but it is still there.
In the case of the D100 ( Announced Feb02 ) the sharper Raw conversion is put down to the greater processing power of a PC.
The D70 ( Announced Jan04 ) converted RAW image shows greater contrast and colour saturation than straight JPEG.
The D50 ( Announced April05 ) shows little difference.
The D2X ( dream machine ) converted RAW appears to show better contrast and colour saturation than JPEG.
D100 review
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond100/page11.asp
D70 review
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond70/page11.asp
D50 review
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond50/page12.asp
D2X review
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond2x/page13.asp
Don