My understanding is that a decent DSLR captures a wider dynamic range than any JPEG can represent. The entire range is recorded in the RAW file. The dynamic range is a property of every camera; it's measurable.
To make a decent HDR photo, one can take a single RAW, decrease its exposure by a few stops, save it out, then re-take the same RAW, increase its exposure, etc., and load these into a tool like Photomatix.
But this seems like busy-work. If dynamic range is a property of the camera, why can't Photomatix and other tools take my single RAW, determine what camera was used (which is already part of the RAW file), and figure out by how much to under- and over-expose the shot to extract maximum information from it?
Answer
There's no need to create several exposures from a raw file to do this, you don't create any extra information. You can simply load the raw file straight into Photomatix and apply the settings as normal.
The reason cameras don't do this automatically is that not everyone likes the look that tonemapping provides, particularly the halos around high contrast edges.
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