With today's prices in hard disk and memory card, there really isn't any reason not to shoot in RAW if you have a digital camera that supports it. You can always shoot RAW+JPEG if you need the convenience of having a JPEG file ready in camera. Dennis is so right about color balance. I was just recently at a show and shot using a white balance calibration card. It's absolutely amazing how the lighting came out with white balance post processing. Another area where RAW is really good is with the blacks and shadow details. Digital cameras have problems with that, when you can see black areas that just don't look right and very artificial when compared to film. There's not much you can do to fix these problems in JPEG. There is a downside of having to spend some time post processing to get images that pop out, but most RAW processing software have some auto adjustment mode that does a fairly decent job. Without some post processing the RAW images are kind of bland. By the way, there are RAW formats that are compressed too, some even using lossy compression in which case your RAW file no longer contain all the information captured by the sensor anymore.
