No facts that I see. Just more opinions and conjecture. I would be more convinced with some cold hard facts to support your beliefs.
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This entire thread is lacking in facts. It starts off with a report of a very reasonable comment from Chuck Westfall, ie. that you can't expect much RAW latitude from a pixel that is less than 2 microns in diameter, then progresses along the lines that RAW is always an advantage and that poor Chuck doesn't know what he's talking about.
Engaging in some conjecture myself, I would guess that when Chuck made that statement (assuming he did and/or was not misquoted) he probably did not have in mind the capabilities of experienced ACR and C1 users who are often prepared to spend hours processing an image to achieve some sort of fine art vision.
P&S cameras are not designed for fastidious perfectionists who will go to any lengths to extract the last 10th of a stop of dynamic range. The issue is not whether Chuck is literally right in asserting that there would be nothing to be gained by including a RAW mode in the G7, but whether or not the benefits would be sufficiently great to interest anyone.
If the cost of including RAW support really is trivial, one might wonder why Canon did not include it
despite technical advice that it would not serve much purpose. A gullible public is often impressed with 'professional sounding' features, so perhaps the Canon marketing team should be congratulated for not adding bells and whistles to the G7 in order to gain a few more sales.
What I think is happening in this thread is, you have a bunch of photographers who are well aware of the significant benefits of shooting RAW with DSLRs and who are making the erroneous assumption that the same degree of improvement of image quality is applicable to a P&S RAW image. If this assumption is not erroneous, then show me the evidence. Someone could perhaps start off with RAW versus jpeg samples from the G6. We could then discount any improvements with the G6, by a certain percentage, and get some idea of what we could have expected from a G7 with RAW mode.
It seems clear to me that a small sensor with 2 micron photosites would produce unacceptable noise at all ISOs, including base ISO, in RAW mode, except with well-lit and very low dynamic range scenes. Is it reasonable to expect any manufacturer to offer a feature on their shiny new product that facilitates the production of crap images, just for the benefit of a few individuals like Jonathan Wienke and John Sheehy who
might be able to do a better processing job than the in-camera algorithms?
I think there's a reasonable assumption being made by Canon that perfectionists and fine-art photographers do not use P&S cameras for that purpose of making fine art photos. The sensors and pixels are simply too small and the dynamic range is just dreadful. If you think I'm exaggerating, it's probably because all your jpeg images from your P&S camera (if you happen to own one, as I do) have had noise reduction already applied in-camera.
My very compact and feature-rich Sony T30 has a few manual features like exposure bracketing and EV adjustments from + to - 2EV, as well as a live histogram. There should be no excuse for blown highlights, apart from complete incompetence. I just recently did a careful comparison of 2 shots of the same scene that differed by one stop exposure. The shot with the greater exposure had irretrievably blown highlights. The shot with half the exposure was just right with respect to the highlights. After levels and curves adjustments in PS to get both images looking similar with respect to over all balance, I pixel-peeped the shadows, expecting to see more noise in the image with one stop less exposure.
Surprise! Surprise! There wasn't. However, what I did notice was a loss of resolution in the image with less exposure, despite the fact that the shutter speed was twice as fast. Grass and foliage appeared slightly smudged (or shall we say, more smudged). Clearly the camera had applied more aggressive noise reduction to the image with less exposure.
As far as I know, there are no noise reduction programs that do not also to some degree blur fine detail. Even the luminance smoothing control in ACR blurs fine detail. One can choose not to apply noise reduction to certain parts of the image, or apply less of it to certain parts of the image, and I concede there might be an advantage there, starting with a noisy RAW image. But I doubt the time and effort would be justified by the results.
Show me some G6 comparisons if you want to argue.