olympus raw images wider than jpeg images

[squeegee]

just out of curiosity, has anyone else noticed that the olympus raw images are wider than the jpegs the cameras produce?

This was true of both my previous e410 and my current e-p1.

Anyone know why they do that?

 

[squeegee]

okay I just found out at least one of the many reasons why it's desirable...
lens barrel distortion correction. It allows the barrel distortion to be corrected, as the corners gets pushed in for correction, the data out side of the visible range can be pushed into the visible rand and used for correction where as if the picture was full size we'd just get back corners after correction - or streched pixels.