Originally posted by JHD The first thing I see is the crop. It seems like they were shot at two different focal lengths.
Either way that is very impressive IQ at iso 800 for such a tiny sensor.
That could be me, to reduce them to 1024 X 768 means some of the image is cropped, not by much, but some, the other reason may be in the way Adobe Camera Raw's lens correction profile may be different from that applied in the camera to correct for the 8.5mm barrel distortion, pretty much inevitable on a lens of that focal length i would think.
Not having any noise reduction applied may account for some of the differences (there is a little noise in the Raw image, but you have to pixel peep to see it).
Chris