Sony Cybershot and DxO Optics Pro software

Only for those of you who are interested in technical details here I show the image as the camera shoots it RAW (in the next post you'll see the corrected or "developed" version)  and tell a bit about the Camera and the software used in the last series:

It is a Sony Cybershot, the one that has a Zeiss-Lens and can shoot 20 megapixels in Sony's own RAW format.

I (almost) always shoot in manual mode, and really always in RAW. To develop the Sony pics I use the "DxO OpticsPro" software in a virtual windows on my Linux computer, because Sony's software that comes with the camera is absolutely useless.

DxO is quite good, it has even some features that Canon's RAW software doesn't have (for example sometimes it corrects the lenses distortion even better).

But it is very slow. Each image needs several seconds to load. Even worse is it to load an image that was already corrected - this will take about 30 seconds... After each adjustment one has to wait again quite long and sometimes it is difficult, for example when adjusting the color temperature or the brightness. The sliders are more or less useless because you don't see the change in the numbers field immediately but only after the adjustment is done - after many seconds. But in most fields I can enter numbers directly, so I can live with that.

A bigger disadvantage is that after a manual adjustment the image does not change directly from original to changed so that the change jumps into your eyes immediately, but in several intermediate steps, so that between the original and the changed version at least one completely different intermediate version is displayed and thus making it impossible to see the difference directly. After the complete adjustment is done one has to click back and forth between the original and the new one. No big deal, but time consuming.

Canon's free software is way better, faster and easier to use.

I think, today the software provided with a camera is just as important as the camera itself and should I ever buy a new digital camera again, after considering all the technical details of the camera I'd for sure first test the software before buying it.

The camera itself is nice. There are several models of the same camera but with different lenses and, to be true, just for the name and the reputation of the brand, I decided for the model with the Zeiss lens although it has a much smaller zoom range. 

I love the Zeiss lenses of my old analogue Hasselblad, in fact since then I have never again experienced a lens of such perfection like those, not even the most expensive Canon lenses.

But I am a bit disappointed of the lens on that Sony camera. When I look at the raw images I can see that it has an extreme distortion (see the vertical lines at the border of the image above, especially to the right).

This distortion gets perfectly corrected by the software (the camera itself does it for its jpg version, or the RAW software does it later), so you wouldn't even notice it unless you look at the original RAW image.

The problem I have with this is that, of course, the correction of the distortion is made digitally, which means that pixels must be removed, stretched or even added by the software - the end product is not a "real" photograph anymore but a mathematically calculated result.

You might call me a purist, but for being a Zeiss lens I'd prefer a good lens that handles the distortion optically and not having  the need of bettering the poor lenses performance digitally. For my Hasselblad I have a wonderful wide angle lens that is absolutely distortion free - no curved lines no matter in what angle you take the photo.

Sometime my expectations and my faith in the quality of a product is just to big, or let's say: naive.

The same already happened with Nikon cameras many many years ago. When I learned my profession you could blindly buy any Nikon and you always had a wonderful high quality camera, no matter which model you have chosen. But then suddenly Nikon brought new consumer models of extremely poor quality (just like Canon with it's plastic lenses) and it made it very complicated to choose between the many models to find the right one.

It seems, the same happened to Zeiss now. I thought the factory would be proud of their products and thus only produce those highest standard articles for which its name stands, or stood.

But these times are long gone. What counts today is mass and money, nothing else. Too bad but it is what is and ranting doesn't change anything. It's me who has to adapt. But still I can be a little bit sad about id, can't I?