One of the reasons pushing me towards a digital SLR is the unacceptable amount of lens error in cheap digicams. The A95 I own is a nice little toy and takes pictures mostly as I want it to if I have the time to set all the settings properly. But not matter how many menus I click through to get it all just right, when I look at the photos later, something is amiss. Most often, this is due to pincushion or barrel distortion.
On the image below, showing the building in Prague we stayed in over Christmas, the façade seems to be bulging at you, and the horizontal lines are bent more than young Beckham's feared free kicks. In reality, both were perfectly straight.
The other day, I installed a little piece of software that I've had on my computer for a while. PTLens quickly, automatically, reliably and correctly removes lens distortions according to a built-in library of cameras and lenses. You download your latest photos and run PTLens on the entire directory. After a minute or two, all is finished, and your original files are preserved. The tool is available for all of fifteen dollars. You can download a test version and correct ten images to see if it fulfills your expectations. I highly recommend it.
The image above was fed through PTLens. You might say that a little bit of pincushion is not a big deal. You might also say that I should buy a digital SLR if I was particular about nice images. You'd be right on both counts, but I'm not one to resist a quick fix.
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