"developing" SX50 HS raw images

That is possible. I have not spent enough time with DPP to do much more than an eyeball comparison of color balance, saturation etc at modest magnification. I run Linux as my OS and Windows only in a VirtualBox virtual machine within Linux. That means it is several steps to getting DPP up and running and I didn't find it interesting enough to do more than check it out on the first few raws.

I've done a lot of tweaking of DNGs produced by my SX20 running CHDK. The advantage there over the ooc jpg is substantial. It is clear that the processing in the SX50 is far more sophisticated and the exposures appear to be more accurate and less prone to blowing highlights than those of the SX20. It will be easy to be satisfied with SX50 jpg-only output under many shooting conditions and especially to get some of the neat features like a speedy burst mode.

I'm not sure, but RawTherapee may be the only image processing program that does all computations using floating point arithmetic. I wouldn't go so far as to say that you would be able to distinguish an image tweaked in floating point from the same image tweaked using 16 or 32-bit integer arithmetic but there are some Fourier transform techniques used in RawTherapee that may require floating point calculations.

Don