RAW deal (again)

Following the never ending, evolving debates on various web fora about E-1 RAW conversion, I've decided to not stick my head in the sand but to have another look at my choices. As far as I know, the major options are: Olympus Studio Adobe Camera RAW PhaseOne CaptureOne Bibble RAW Shooter Essentials Silkypix Developer DcRaw Silverfast DC And a few others. My choice is from the first 3, for various reasons, none of which imply that the others are no good (for example, Raw Shooter is PC only). At the moment I'm using CaptureOne Pro 3.7 (C1) as default. But I'm going to take another look at Studio. Although as far as workflow is concerned, C1 seems by far the best (although, to be fair, it takes some getting used to), in outright image quality Studio may be better. The problem is that the level of adjustment that can be done in Studio is lower than C1, which means that some processing I do in C1 will have to be moved to Photoshop. Not a showstopper. Many, many "tests" of RAW developers use the in-camera JPEG as a benchmark. This is silly, for several reasons. Perhaps the most important one is that through using RAW, you can - and often should - take "wrong" photos. For example, if you want to maximise dynamic range by deliberately over exposing ("expose to the right"), you do so in the clear knowledge that you will correct this in RAW development. The camera doesn't know this: the JPEG it produces assumes that the exposure is "correct". Following on from this, the quality of information and the degree of control that the RAW software provides is very significant to extracting the optimal image. I strongly believe that most, if not all RAW converters can be adjusted to produce similar results, at least in terms of contrast, saturation and white balance (read "colour"). Many so-called comparative tests mainly reveal that the tester doesn't really understand the software and/or the underlying principles, and I include myself in that. However, it is inarguable that each program has it's own unique default settings, and these, since they establish the "starting point", both give a string initial impression of the software's value, and influence the way in which the user interprets the RAW data to produce a final image. Working on a purely subjective basis, the image characteristics as opened by the software ("a bit dark", "a bit blue", etc) have a strong influence on the corrections the user applies. Well, that sets the background. If I get any conclusive results I'll report back...