For reasons unknown, most PNG files were showing up in the PDF output with reverse coloration (or at least significantly shifted. Saving these files as JPEGs provided a cheap workaround. Also a number of images were either (a) exceeding the boundaries of the PDF viewport or (b) scaling down to thumbnail size. Now using width/contentwidth/scaling attributes in <mediaobject> elements, as described at http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ImageSizing.html to ensure that all images show up correctly scaled in both HTML and PDF outputs.