Originally Posted by Ashley 
The crops I printed out at 200% revealed the raw image to be the same in colour and contrast but sharper than the jpeg!
I opened the images in Photoshop Elements 6 and printed from there.
I've been using raw for a few months now but have never tried to print the unprocessed raw photo.
Has anyone else tried this?
All things being equal the raw file contains much more information.
1) K10D raws are 36-bits color vs 24-bits for jpeg.
2) jpeg is compressed, hard edges will often suffer.
3) jpeg are created by the tiny camera on-board processor in a fraction of a second, leading to some compromises
This is the theory. In practice most people won't see any significant differences. The real difference is when you process the picture, for reasons a lot of people already pointed out in this thread.