You didn't get it, so you should just use a film camera.

Of course, I started with film, then moved to slide, since I've had
the D70 (>6mo) I've taken 1 MF photo with a hasselblad  and the rest
is pure digital baby!

You can't, it's impractical (unless you are doing commercial work,
maybe). Just like you still can't really do it with any significant
level of control on a dSLR today. People used to put up with yellow
tungsten photos, blue people standing in the shade and even took great
glee in cross-processing the negs to widen the gap between the result
and reality even further.

Not me, not now. I check and adjust color balance to taste on every
photo that's destined to become a print. The only way I could do this
before was to scan the negative/slide and work on the RAW file it gave
me.

But color temperature controls are just two of the 21 sliders on the
RAW importer dialog. Here are some other major ones:

Exposure. This usually needs a tweak. Often less than 1/3 stop which
is beyond my ability to control the camera at shoot time, but
sometimes more - especially if only one channel is close to clipping.

Anti-vignetting is nearly always employed to provide an evenly lit
image, esp. if you are shooting at a zoom's wider side. This helps
later with any off-center cropping you might do, preventing a dark
corner that you'd get if you didn't do this correction. Minor, subtle
yes but I know it's there.

Occasionally you want to increase the vignetting due to it's
compositional enhancement qualities. This slider does a much better
job than I've seen Photoshop do. Keeps it subtle.

Sharpening. I detest that happening in-camera as it does with a JPEG.
This should *always* be the final thing that happens to an image, not
the first. Sharpening has to be applied with output size in mind, and
no camera allows you to tell it that the destination print is 8x10 vs
6x4 vs a 600x400dpi email so it can modify the JPEG sharpening
accordingly.

De-noise filters. Applied automatically when you save as a JPEG, but
in reality the quantity of this effect you need changes with each
image and the ISO you shot it at.

Shadows. The JPEG gets a 'levels' cut at around 5%, anything below
rapidly being pushed to black. This helps cut down shadow noise and
gives the image some punch, but often this default is not suitable,
especially in high dynamic-range scenes.

Saturation. Again, each image is different. Portraits need less than a
landscape of Cinderella's Castle, Magic Kingdom. How can the camera
know what you are looking at? It doesn't.

On very rare occasions some of the other sliders get a twiddle:
Chromatic Aberration for example.

RAW isn't for everyone, just like doing your own film darkroom work
isn't for everyone, but to assume people do either just to fix
mistakes is way off the mark.

I believe that the vast majority who use RAW do so to maintain control
of the whole workflow, and not just let the camera make up some
bullshit defaults and be happy with that. The quality argument is a
secondary issue for me, I'm not anti-JPEG, just pro-RAW.

RAW is the original digitization of the sensor voltages.  In-camera JPEG
makes an arbitrary re-mapping of these values, and then smashes them a
little flat with lossy compression.  Even without the lossy compression,
the JPEG set to normal parameters in daylight white balance throws away
almost 2 stops of red highlights, a stop and a half of blue, and about a
stop of green, on my 2 Canon DSLRs.  Not only that, but several RAW
levels in the highlight ranges that aren't clipped are posterized to a
single level in the JPEG, meaning that you have less capability to
enhance areas of low contrast to make them look the way your eyes and
brain see them.

That is circular reasoning.  Let me break your circle; you can't capture
the dynamic range in JPEG that you can in RAW.  If you limit the DR to
what the JPEG can do in your test, of course there won't be much
difference.

If I want my images to have the kind of DR that I can see detail in with
my eyes and brain; RAW takes me a lot closer to that than JPEG does.

RAW is not editing, RAW is the pure sensor data in full 12 bit (14 bit on
some equipment) with TIFF and JPEG the camera algorithms decides to throw
away 4 bits of info. There is more available dynamic range in RAW, it also
is not lossy like a jpeg file. Sometimes a lossy jpeg is good enough.

RAW is like better film, it's like shooting Kodak MAX versus a Pro film like
Porta.

Ok analogy, jpeg is like negative film because you settle for what the lab
tells you is a good print. RAW is like going into a colour lab and printing
my own prints hmmm I did that for 30 years ;) However jpeg uses a lossy
compression algorithm, and quality is lost ever time you open and resave the
image.

But the discussion can be summed up as RAW is too hard, so I need outside
help. I agree 100% with you on correct exposure is key to good images, film
or digital. There are lazy shooters that will shoot RAW with the hope that
they can use the Photoshop "make it perfect" plug-in. I shoot RAW for all my
serious shooting, but might shoot jpeg for a quick web shot or happy snap.

Darrell Larose
Ottawa, Canada

Clever...never heard that one before.

The post I replied to said that people who used RAW didn't know how to
take pictures. That moronic statement shows that the person doesn't
know what they're talking about.

I shoot RAW about 99.999% of the time because it gives me more control
over the final image. I don't mess with white balance (and shouldn't
have to) and I've been very pleased with the prints I've had made.

I've been doing photography since 1966 and made a living at it for 16+
years. Anything else you'd like to know?