The fact that they are competing with each other, so that different people prefer one over the other, says to me that jpeg is clearly able to produce images equal to RAW - they may be different, but they can be just as good.
Pete, this assertion is wrong. You may prefer the OOC color rendition to whatever you are able to produce yourself in post, but that doesn't confirm that in-camera JPG capture is superior to RAW capture. There is much more to image quality than just color rendition. And as you develop skills in image editing, with the tools available in Lightroom/Aperture, the sky is the limit in development potential. You are only fooling yourself in declaring that JPG capture is equal to RAW capture. Looking at the above comparison of RAW & JPG captures tells you NOTHING about whether JPG is equal to RAW capture.
I know you have been fiddling around with your Panasonic in-camera settings, trying to find one or two in-camera JPG settings that will suffice for every photographic situation you might encounter. I believe you're trying to find a way to garner the satisfaction that many find with Olympus OOC color. That's great, for what it is. But don't try to declare that JPG capture is the equal to RAW capture - it isn't.
The tools available in Lightroom/Aperture are vastly superior to the relatively crude in-camera JPG settings in nature, precision, and degree. And the RAW file format is similarly vastly superior to JPG in richness and depth of image detail content. Combine the richly detailed RAW capture with the power of Lightroom/Aperture and you've got a vastly superior system for image development. That's even easier to use that fiddling around with the few, crude, in-camera JPG settings.
About all that one really can say that's true is that the images
can look acceptably similar from both methods under limited circumstances.... when the image has been captured as perfectly as possible (this can be a fair bit of work at moment of capture if you don't have all day to fuss around with in-camera settings) and when you only evaluate them at screen resolution on a forum.
You can take any of the above images and with adjustments make more and less pleasing renditions in color tone, shadow detail, brightness, etc. but the degree to which you can do this is significantly greater if you start with a RAW vs. a JPG.
In the case of those who want to use the famous "Oly JPG colors", capturing both JPG and RAW gives the most capability of all... you have the OOC Oly colors and you have the RAW for any other direction you might want to take a given image, when you have more time and better tools to fine tune and tweak the captures.
BUT, in this scenario - looking at 800 pixel images on a computer display - there is no way you can possibly truly evaluate results in any meaningful way whatsoever. The potential tweaks that can be made to the RAW file in Lightroom/Aperture are so vast that comparison of OOC JPG to any given development of the RAW in LR/Aper is not terribly fruitful.
Camera-processed JPG files are relatively fragile in their ability to be manipulated in post. A little bit more than mild processing adjustments to a camera-processed JPG typically pushes the file data to ruin. If you capture in JPG and discard the RAWs, as you repeatedly pronounce as a wonderful way to work, you have destroyed your ability to effect significant development potential of the image after the moment of capture. Doing so makes no sense whatsoever to me.
And all you have to do to bump into stone walls with JPG capture is:
1) having a very wide dynamic range to capture,
2) detail existing in shadow areas and in highlight areas that you want to retrieve,
3) significant shifts in color balance, levels, curves that you want to effect,
4) conversion to very richly toned B&W renditions,
5) enlargement to wall display sizes...
6) creation of a variety of very different potential development results
and more...
in all of these situations, the RAW will be unmistakably superior to the JPG.
