Okay – not everything looks better in black and white.  One of the nice things about shooting RAW – you can always go back and take a shot you did as b&w and retrieve the color.  It’s not even retrieving since the camera sees and records the shot in color.  So for anyone who says, oh, why in the world would I ever want to shoot in RAW mode – I can tell you that here are the reasons:

1) You really do get the equivalent, maybe moreso than what used to be the negative

2) You generally get “headroom” to get back highlights you may have lost in the jpg

3) If you make a living from your shots, one day you are really going to shoot yourself for even thinking of shooting in anything other than RAW

4) The raw conversion programs just get better and better.  A shot that may have been hard to print a few years ago – well now it’s perfectly usable.

5) There really is no reason not to, unless your camera isn’t capable of shooting RAW.

I bet there are other reasons I haven’t thought of, but these are the main ones.