I find the potential of a metering advantage with the in-camera crop to be heavily outweighed by the quality of the raw files relative to the Sony jpegs. A slight miss in metering is usually more than close enough given the incredible DR of this sensor. But the couple of times I've tried Clear Image Zoom I just didn't find the quality of the file nearly as good as a cropped raw, which can still be very very good at well below 10mp if you're not planning huge prints...
-Ray
RAY:
I thought a lot about your above statement about a PP crop in RAW being better than a Clear Image Zoom in Jpeg.
First most of the time a RAW will convert to JPEG eventually.
My experience is that using the Clear Image Zoom results in far better image quality of the zoomed image, compared to the RAW file cropped in PP to approx. the same size.
I took the following shots in Clear Image Zoom and list their resolutions:
Zoomed:
1) In Image Quality L24M 2,0x (70mm) resolution 6000 x 4000 (24,0M)
2) " " " M10M 3,0x (105mm) " " 3936 x 2624 ( 9,6M)
3) " " " S4,6M 4,5x (158mm) " " 2640 x 1760 ( 4,7M)
The RAW file, Image Quality L24M, cropped to approximately the same sizes as the zoomed sizes:
1) Resolution 2610 x 1740 (4,5M)
2) " " 2047 x 1364 (2,8M)
3) " " 1503 x 1002 (1,5M)
When zoomed to 70mm no resolution is lost; when cropped in PP to approx. the same size as the zoomed size, the resolution decreases from 24M to 4,5M!
In the other two crops the cropped sizes are approx. 70% smaller than the zoomed sizes!
Based on the resulting resolution the zoomed images are much better and can be used for larger prints.
What mistake in interpretation do I make?
Harry