Sony Best RAW converter for RX100?

Andrew H

New Member
Hello everyone, this is my first post in this forum.

I have owned my RX100 Mk 1 for just two months now, and I am very, very pleased with it.

The designers did an amazing job of cramming a 1 inch sensor and a 3.6x zoom lens into such a small package and, inevitably, they had to make some compromises to achieve this. In particular, the actual barrel distortion at the wide angle end is very considerable, as is the chromatic aberration. The really clever bit is how exceptionally well the camera's JPEG engine corrects for these, such that the user is really not aware that they even exist.

However, I currently shoot RAW + JPEG and prefer to use the RAW for all the usual reasons, e.g. the opportunity to change white balance after the event and to extract more dynamic range to hold detail in the shadows and highlights. I have been struggling to find a RAW converter which does such a good job as the in-camera JPEG engine in correcting the lens distortions. LR4 and ACR both give results in which the corners of the converted image are of noticeably lower quality than those from the corresponding out-of-camera JPEG.

The converter I have settled on is DxO Optics Pro. They seem to have got the distortion correction spot on, and their new noise correction algorithm in the just released version 9 is nothing short of phenomenal. For those who haven't tried it a 30 day free trial is available, as is an introductory price of $99, down from $169, if purchased by November 20.

What do other RX100 owners use as their favourite RAW converter, please?

p.s. Having just read through the above before posting I realise it reads a little like an advert, so I hasten to add that I have no affiliation whatever with DxO, other than being a happy user of their software.
 
I've been playing with both Lightroom 4 and DxO 8 (and 9 trial) and I'm not entirely happy with either.

At low ISO I prefer the camera JPEGs (with a bit of correction in LR sometimes) to what I can cook up from the raw file. Especially the colors and sharpening I just can't seem to match even with all the fancy features of DxO and LR.

At high ISO I prefer Lightroom. I find it's noise reduction better than DxO, even the new fancy NR from DxO 9, which just seems to turn everything to plastic in my view. I prefer a bit of grain over unnatural smoothing out of details.
 
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