I had been wondering which was better coming from my new camera; the Jpeg or the Raw capture. On my Nikon D200, I would have had to have taken one shot and then twiddled with the dial and taken another. I tried it a few times but the images were never quite alike. The Nikon D7000 has the ability to take the same sensor image and capture it as raw and save it as a jpeg.
This a slice of the moon that was over our neighborhood taken as a jpeg —>
<—This is the raw file after being sent thru Adobe Camera Raw and into Photoshop Elements 9. Again this is the same light captured by the camera but processed into two different images.
I think that I'll be shooting raw for the foreseeable future.
Yay raw files! Yay blogging!
By the way, your D200 DOES allow you to shoot RAW + JPEG at any compression.
I have been shooting raw and jpeg and have not noticed a big difference, but if I like the image I almost always process from raw. It allows me to correct more of my feeble errors.