Camera Raw problems...losing color saturation...what next?

[Metal]

I found out that Adobe finally made a camera raw plug-in for Photoshop CS so that I can shoot and use Sony F828 raw files. Normally I shoot .tiff files, but since I now have the plug in, I decided to shoot a bunch of photos in the "raw" file format. When I go to save the file for web use, which means high compression, I lose more than half of the color saturation. The photo looks unbelievably bad. The exact same thing happens when I go to print one of these from a .psd file, I lose more than half the color saturation. The only way I can compensate for this is to pump up the color saturation to a rediculously high level, then when it loses half the color, it looks normal, but my reds and yellows are impossible to live with. This never happened when I shot, printed and saved for web with photos that originated as .tiff files. Does anyone know what's going on, what I'm doing wrong, and how to resolve this? Also, do you know if raw files are compressed at all? Aren't they supposed to be as good as .tiff files as far as quality when it comes to large prints, noise or artifacts?

[Metal]

I'm replying to my own post since I figured out what was wrong. Everything I read said that since my camera doesn't shoot in 16 bit that there's no reason to edit in 16 bit. When I went to the Camera Raw workflow controls and switched the color Depth from 8 bit to 16 bit, the problem was solved.