As luck would have it, Canon's Digital Photo Professional was already applying a higher level of sharpening and contrast by default, delivering a punchier-looking image, but to really illustrate the effect, I additionally tweaked the Levels so there were tonal values present at 0.

It's immediately clear how the RAW crops in the right column below look much punchier than the in-camera JPEG crops on the left. The second crop on the right side is arguably over-sharpened and is suffering from some artefacts when viewed at 100%, but the other three are generally preferrable over the in-camera JPEGs.

As always, your mileage will vary depending on the scene, the settings and even the RAW converter itself. But the ability to shoot in RAW gives the S100 a key advantage over cameras which only record JPEGs. Not only can you easily make all manner of adjustments from white balance to sharpness and noise reduction, but you can also dictate the level of compression (if any at all) when exporting the file at the end of the process.

Additionally RAW files generally include a higher tonal dynamic range to work with, which often allows you to retrieve detail previously lost in the highlight areas. I tried this with several RAW files on the S100 and found there was indeed some exposure latitude available, but as you'd expect it wasn't to the same degree as a camera with a bigger sensor. For example, the areas of this image which are saturated white, such as the snow and rooftops, remained purely white regardless of any adjustments to the RAW processing.

Now let's move onto the performance across the sensitivity range in my Canon S100 noise results. Alternatively skip to my S100 sample images or straight to the S100 verdict.