Hello,
I'm finally beginning to understand where the learning curve is, to say nothing of how far behind I am. Much gratitude to those of you that openly post your questions and concerns and to those of you who take the time to answer. This forum, as it relates to digital photography, is mostly about shooting and processing in raw. It's possible that I should have taken this question to the beginner's forum but since I've been stumbling around here for some time, I decided to post here.
Maybe one day I will feel the need to shoot in raw but for the time being I'm going to continue to shoot the finest and largest jpegs in which ever camera system I decided to buy. What I have learned here is that when shooting jpegs the camera processing from lens to memory does a whole lot for you that most all of you folks choose to do in post processing because you use the raw mode. I, shooting jpegs, am constrained in what I can do after the image is stored. I love including this quote from a 16:9 article written last May because it describes precisely what I like in beholding photographs. "The mystery was that Minolta never made a camera to match the professional appeal of the lenses. So pros moved on to Canon and Nikon. And though their loyalty to Minolta glass was broadly supplanted by relationships with optical stars of a different stripe, many working shooters missed the Minolta drawing style: lush colour, smoother-than-smooth bokeh and an appealing rendition that eschews the dramatically contrasty nature of Canon and Nikon lenses in favour of a Leica-flavoured, high-res presentation that gently rolls off the tonal extremes for open shadows and well-tamed highlights."
Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, all have fairly elaborate menu choices for tweaking saturation, sharpness, contrast, hue, and possibly furthur catagories. As a jpeg shooter I can, through experiment, set up my camera to find the settings that best serve my desired outcome. I can learn where best to place exposure. Then I trip the shutter and concede all that raw potential for a result greatly limited but still available for some manipulation. The question then is, all things considered, does one have a better chance of achieving that "high-res presentation that gently rolls off the tonal extremes for open shadows and well-tamed highlights", with one camera's jpeg processor than another's?
I shoot landscapes and love "natural" color. I don't want to ask a question merely moot but if there are decided differences to be considered that experienced photographers understand about the way the different cameras render jpeg images and deposit them in memory I would like very much to know. I'm considering Nikon, Sony, Olympus and Canon, FX or DX. Thank you very much.
Peter