The Sony Alpha 700 is Sony’s flagship dSLR for the time being, and until the Alpha 900 is released. The Alpha 700 has a whole bunch of nice features, but some of its built-in processing power isn’t appreciated much by the purist photographer. The built-in noise reduction algorithm, for example. Indeed, when you convert an ISO 3200 photo taken with the Alpha 700 in Adobe Camera RAW --for example through Lightroom-- you’ll notice an ugly pattern of “blobs” instead of plain noise. But there’s an easy way to never see those blobs at all: run the photo through a different RAW converter.

Admittedly, if you already have a RAW converter and you’re happy with it, you will not be inclined to change programs because your Alpha 700 photos don’t look well, or because I say the RAW converter matters. And that’s why I’m going to show it to you.

The only RAW converter I do not currently have running on my system is DXO Labs’ DXO optics Pro 5. That’s because DXO still hasn’t released the new version of their RAW converter for the Mac. Except for DXO Optics Pro, I opened and converted the same photo from the Sony Alpha 700 in Capture One 4, Aperture 2, Lightroom, SilkyPix Developer Studio, Sony’s RAW Image Converter, LightZone, and GraphicConverter.

The photo that I took was a picture of a furry toy Mickey Mouse at very low light levels (Mickey was hardly visible) and with the camera set to a whopping ISO 3200. In other brand cameras of this level, such as the Canon EOS 40D, you can switch off noise reduction algorithms entirely. In the Sony Alpha 700 it’s been stated that this is impossible, and some noise reduction in-camera will always appear with firmware v.3 as soon as you take photographs at ISO levels above ISO 800.

The result of the in-camera noise reduction is that some RAW converters --Adobe Camera RAW is notorious for it-- will make the image look like someone has tried to blend the noise particles using a watercolour brush dabbing the whole photo. The resulting image has “blobs” all over it. 

I found that these blobs don’t appear at all with Aperture 2, LightZone and SilkyPix Developer Studio. They appear, but in a very subdued way with Sony’s own RAW converter (depending on the setting used) and with GraphicConverter (!), and they are apparent with Lightroom and Capture One.

All conversions --and the screen shots taken-- were done using the default settings of the software used, except where stated differently. You will notice that SilkyPix Developer Studio offers a very accurate and powerful noise reduction algorithm. It is one of the manual adjustments that I tried and found to be offering very nice results involving a minimum of effort and time. SilkyPix Developer Studio was closely followed by LightZone.

Apple’s Aperture 2 came in a close third, especially the default (automatic) setting seems to be a good choice as it seems to strike a good balance between noise and smoothness without reinforcing the “blobbiness” of the in-camera noise reduction. Capture One 4 did a good job too, but not in its default state. I had to manually adjust the settings to get an acceptable result.

Based on these quick and dirty test results, my advice for any Sony Alpha 700 owner would be to try SilkyPix Developer Studio, LightZone and Apple’s Aperture 2 --in that order-- and see for yourself which application gives the best results. LightZone is a bit of an oddball with respect to image editing, but is worthwhile considering given these results.

Over the coming weeks and months, all RAW converters will be subjected to rigourous testing, including converting several image types, including Hasselblad RAW and Phase One digital back RAW files.

If these preliminary tests of the Alpha 700 have anything to show for, it must be --in my opinion-- the camera’s output quality. Sony’s local product manager told me the Alpha 700 isn’t being positioned as a professional camera, and from what I’ve read on the web here and there, even the Alpha 900 won’t be positioned as a professional’s dSLR camera. Perhaps not professional, but surely semi-pro is a moniker that is no overstatement of the Alpha 700’s capabilities?

Another conclusion we can come to, is that no RAW file exists by itself. It all depends on the demosaicing algorithm used if a Camera RAW file looks decent or just plain ugly. Of course you can never create something good from a bad source, but if the source is all right, then the converted result can be bad or good, depending on the software used.