This is a very interesting conversation.

My department is an in-house advertising dept. as well. We create ads, posters, brochures etc. for a company that auctions equipment.
The photos we put in the brochures are coming from our guys in the field - they are down loaded pretty much directly from their digital cameras onto our computers. So we get JPEG to work with.
The fun part of today's digital photography is that it is designed to have VERY realistic color and therefore hardly needs color correction. MUCH better than scanning old-fashioned paper photos.

Now, since we're talking about LOTS of photos per brochure, it normally takes hours to process all of them...
We get all the photos on the same day; brochure needs to be finished in 2 days; sometimes there's 4 brochures that need to be finished on the same day and I'm pretty much the only one who can build them.
So sometimes I end up working on a silly brochure till the wee hours, mainly because processing the photos can take so long.

Right now, we're doing a test which you might find very interesting.
I've built an example brochure in InDesign 4.0.3 using only the raw JPEG images. No color correction, no CMYK conversion etc.
I know, horror, but it's the result that counts... These brochures are mass-produced and of course not anywhere near corporate-brochure-quality. Therefore they cannot be as time consuming to build.

....Yesterday we sent the result to our printer, to see what will happen - they do not know we used only JPEG images.
The file we sent to them is a PDF, created using the same settings we use for normal, CMYK-photo-brochures.
These settings were provided by our printer (which imho is what every professional printer should do).

To me the PDF looks fine. Ok, a couple of pictures need some adjustment (too dark or bright), but to be perfectly honest - most of them look great, hardly any noticable color shifts so far.

I can't wait to hear what our printer thinks, and to see what the printed brochure looks like.
We might be able to cut HOURS from the brochure production time if conversion to CMYK and severe color correction isn't needed, and only basic adjustments are necessary! No more night shifts!

I'll keep you updated