the way I see it, these new cameras which tonemap and blend the images together in-camera are likely to be good for timesaving, but still won't offer the degree of control you can get by doing it yourself... it's effectively a bastardised evolution of the jpeg vs RAW argument - do you want the camera to do a few things to make it "look good" as soon as you upload to the computer (losing some of the image information along the way), or do you want all the detail you were able to capture, to do with at your own leisure and as you please..?

personally I'm pretty sick of seeing overdone hdr work, especially when it comes to the haloing often created by tonemapping, and the colour casts it sometimes introduces... in terms of getting a realistic, high quality image with an equivalent dynamic range to a tonemapped hdr image, I can't see that anything can be better than manually blending the exposures yourself in photoshop using layer masks and exercising a good degree of patience... for those images that are worth it, well... it's worth it!

I see hdr as doing kind of the same thing as a jpeg - make an image look good quickly and chuck away the rest of the irrelevant exposure information.... you'd still need to set up on a tripod if the exposures are to be accurately merged and blended anyway, so why having gone to that effort would you not want to have full control over the output? maybe it's just me but then I ALWAYS shoot in raw, and take great care with my conversions and processing... I can understand others might differ in this view.... bottom line, hdr and its incorporation into newest cameras = convenience, and also partly marketing hype ;) just my 2p

Adam Edwards Photography