Pixel Peeping Syndrome

First things first...

Below, a nice sample of what this camera can do.  It's a piece of pottery from the Milwaukee Art Museum, shot with the lens wide open, at probably ISO 5000, Auto WB, and checked out some time later in the camera monitor.  It looked nice...  

Then, I downloaded it to my Mac... and I didn't quite like what I saw... 

When I bought this camera, I already had looked at all the possible images taken with it, found in Nikon ads (their website had some), Flicker and Nikonians.  One thing that really sold me was the almost absolute perfection.  As a friend said once about his conversion to digital, there was no grain. 

But then, how about them pixels?

Can you see the little devils?  I thought I had... in the RAW file!  This is too much... I want purity, clarity, sincerity, absolutely no granulosity...

Then, it dawned on me: I've become a pixel peeper. 

Must admit it: before opening the daffodil above (which, by the way, was done with my SB-600 at f8, in a futile attempt at reproducing the darkening of the background that relatively fast shutterspeeds can do with flash), I looked at it really close.  There they were again.  Heck!  There they are, under the naked eye, right above... and, alas, below too. 

Same little daffodil, a bit posterized because of my clumsiness at using Photoshop.  

BTW, the shot above was done with a close aperture, in P, with an SB-600.  My attempts at getting overexposed foregrounds and dark backgrounds are failing miserably...  But I'm even more frustrated because of this stupid habit of looking for flaws and pixelation.  

Is there a cure?

I guess I'll have to learn to live with it.  

In any case, for whatever is worth, I placed an order for Nikon Capture NX2 earlier this week.  It may be coming soon.  And my Nikon AF-ED 80-200 f2.8 lens is in the shop right now. 

However, life still looks good.

More about things later!