This is a comparison of the processing of ORF raw files to JPEG by various editors. The closest I can compare to the raw file is a Tiff file created by Olympus Viewer v2. All the other processed shots are direct from the raw editor to JPEG - highest quality possible. Unfortunately Pbase insists on converting the tiff to a JPEG for display so it only shows how well their converter works. Hence, I call it PseudoTiff. All the JPEG files are identified by the name of the editor.

From the shots I have here, it is clear that if one goes directly from RAW editing to JPEG the two Olympus programs seem to give superior results whereas the others give blocked shadows and somewhat blown highlights. On the other hand there are other reasons to prefer some of the other editors for general editing. But, there is a way round this. If one uses say Viewer to do the RAW editing and then saves the result as a TIFF, then you can do more editing of the 16 bit TIFF with any of AE7, PSCS4, or ACDSee. You can see this by looking at the results of converting the Viewer TIFF file to JPEG by these editors. Compare the results with the direct Viewer produced JPEG. I find this useful in PSCS4 since I can just save the ORF in Viewer as a Tiff (doing no editing) and then use the very flexible PSCS4 Raw editor on the Tiff file.

For some reason the EXIF information is missing. All, of course, came from the same ORF file. So here are the particulars: camera E-520
lens Zuiko 14-54mm
ISO 200
aperture f/8
Flength 14mm
time 1/5 sec