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Very nice. So what is the bit depth per color channel for the raw images?


I think the camera has about 12-bits per channel in the RAW data.
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I'm guessing that's the reason you're getting so much better results... The JPGs can only do 8 bits per color channel, while the raw images are doing more than that, thus the better dynamic range,


The output is still JPG (8-bits/channel) in both cases, and both methods use the RAW data to create the JPG..
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and your postprocessing does a better job of bringing out that dynamic range than the in-camera processing does.


Yes. But for a non-tweaked process, I really expected the camera to do a similarly good job, expecially since it has more info available to it than what dcraw has (all of the proprietary Canon extra stuff from the RAW data).

Oh well.

Cheers