Well, there ya go. In-Camera "digital zoom" will work better (than out-of-camera cropping) because the camera has access to the full RAW data when it does it internally. Whereas doing it out-of-camera only has the JPG data, which has already suffered losses during interpolation and compression.

Using RAW format files should level the playing field, but is far less convenient. With cameras and sensors as good as they are now, I feel that shooting JPGs directly is more than good enough for most purposes.

With my own large DSLR, I have the camera save both JPG and RAW to the flash card. The RAW is there in case I want to make large prints or heavy crops (aka. "digital zoom"), but 99.9% of the time now I just use the JPGs.

Cheers!