Doing some comparisons with Canon setup

<p >Hi Everyone,</p>

<p >I have been using the Canon 550D (T2i) with the Canon EF-S 15-85mm lens. I am thinking of switching to the Sony A55 with the Carl Zeiss DT 16-80mm lens.</p>

<p >Several things I find useful in my Canon setup are:</p>

<p >1. Highlight tone priority</p>

<p >2. Peripheral illumination correction</p>

<p >3. DPP is easy to use</p>

<p >Are 1 and 2 available in Sony? As for 3, is Sony's raw converter easy to use?</p>

<p >I gather Highlight tone priority is like Nikon's D lighting. It tries to prevent overblown highlights. Peripheral illumination correction is to correct light falloff in the corners when wide angle is used. It doesn't fully correct but it is better than not having it.</p>

<p >DPP has a noise removing function which is quite useful as one can immediately thereafter do sharpening before converting the file to tiff.</p>

<p >I will be enlightened to see some replies.</p>

<p>I am a Canon user also and don't know the answer for Sony, BUT everything else (except the Hghlight tone priority) can be managed in Lightroom. I find LR way better and more flexible than DPP.</p>

<p>The Sony raw converter has something called D-Range Optimizer which sounds like the Highlight tone priority and it does have a Peripheral illumination correction. Sony's seem easy enough for me to use though I don't really use either of those functions. I think you should be able to download a copy of the Sony raw converter and check it out yourself to make sure.</p>

<p>Sony's Image Data Converter provides good quality and noise reduction as well as quite a number of other adjustments, but unfortunately the Sony approach to workflow is a bit clunky, especially when it comes to viewing & selecting thumbnails. The latter is supposed to be done with a separate program called Image Data Lightbox (both together are called Image Data Suite), opening folders in IDL and then picking images to transfer for editing into IDC tends to be more timeconsuming than third party raw editors/converters.</p>

<p>Not sure whether it's still an issue in the very latest version, but when I moved to Mac OSX 10.6 last January there turned out to be a window-refreshing problem in IDC, so I played with trial versions of bibble, dxo and capture one & decided to go with Capture One v5.2 which I've really enjoyed using these past months.</p>

<p>You'll find quite a bit of discussion and comments on the performance of various raw editors with Sony raw files in <a href="http://www.dyxum.com/dforum/digital-darkroom_forum6.html">www.dyxum.com</a></p>