Do you shoot AdobeRGB?

I'm with Roger on this one; why throw away data if you can shoot in a larger color space to begin with? You can always subtract later, but adding back what wasn't there in the first place will be less than satisfactory.

I always shoot RAW, and develop with C1 into AdobeRGB. I would use ProphotoRGB, but the Digital Rebel version of C1 doesn't allow outputting to any color spaces other than sRGB and AdobeRGB.

That will become a moot matter in a few weeks, though, as C1 is dropping their entry-level low cost Digital Rebel version, and forcing upgrades to LE. Current Digital Rebel customers will get advantageous upgrade pricing, but that has not been posted, yet.

C1LE, in any respect, is still a good deal, for the price. And I believe that you can choose alternate output spaces (other than sRGB and AdobeRGB) with it. Another item to be aware of, though, is that PhaseOne is dropping support for Win98/SE/ME with the new 3.5 release.

That leaves my four-year old laptop out in the cold

If you're not shooting RAW, then it might make sense to shoot in a smaller color space because there will be a smaller risk of banding. After all, an 8-bit JPEG can only cover so much color space before quantization effects become noticeable.

Um, I think the point was to not only develop to AdobeRGB space, but to also shoot RAW. I guess I kind of took that for granted.

RAW records 12 bits (at least in Canon cameras, so far). JPEG is just a loss (pun intended) to start with, and only gets worse the more you fool with an image during post-processing.

If you always nail the shot right on the money, then shoot JPEG, if you will.

I'm not good enough to do that with any confidence, so I shoot RAW and develop to AdobeRGB 16-bit TIFFs, so I get a second chance, even if the eventual usage can only use 8 bits and sRGB.