Agreed, that could actually salvage a picture one would otherwise throw away, IF (and I stress) the saving is of the raw info. The HW camera could serve a compressed stream (which I assume it does), in which case the denoise would be almost identical. If it serves only 5% better, waiting 10 seconds is a bad trade-off. Only one in 200 pics would be saved by this, and it would be a bad shot anyway. Sequence shooting would help more.

I am unsure what you mean by 1-2 EV. Exposure values have little impact on pre/post compression, most advantages of EV are due to exposure BEFORE the shot is taken. Once the shot is too dark, stretched, shaken, whatever, there is nothing to gain by RAW. Information has been clipped (or lost if smudged) and I very much doubt N900 has a HDR sensor that has low-light info that gets clipped by JPEG 24 bit compression.

Your statement is only relevant on high-end DSLR sensors that do above eight bit. Normal consumer cameras don't get clipped. E.g., my Sony does 12 bit per pixel, saving in RAW allows me to pull that info by sliding the data over (brightness) or compressing the range (contrast). That info is lost when saved in JPEG. That's why it HAS RAW.

@rambo, "if 10sec save times were acceptable you could get pictures of similar quality as high-end "prosumer" cameras" is a statement that, first of all, refers to best-case scenarios, with good light. A CCD prosumer in low light would be laughing all the way to the bank.

Second of all, there is no replacement for glass. While it is conceivable that in good lighting one could compare an N900 shot to a compact camera (pocket-compact), there is no way it gets comparable shots to a large-glass prosumer, even if the build is electronic and can't change optics, making them non-DSLR (prosumer).

Most of the noise in the shot is inserted by the CMOS sensor that fires up randomly in low light (high noise) - in low light only post-processing saves SOME of the data, but it has to be done inside the camera, since it implies median correction of successive/continuous exposures.

This has little to nothing to do with RAW. It helps a little, but doesn't fix anything.

My bet is the original talk was about post-processing, such as median denoise, precise demosaicing and color balancing. These does not equate in EV-equivalents.