All: You're welcome. I am happy that you found the post useful.
I have tried RAW therapee, but couldn't find vng-4......
In RawTherapee the demosaicing algorithm is selected under the RAW tab at the far right of the window. There are 7 different algorithms from which to select. If the window is too small, you may need to scroll the tabs right to see this one. Alternately, the center frame can be narrowed in order to be able to see all the tabs in the right hand frame.
Anyway one would assume that a Canon native raw would at least be converted best by DPP.
I have not used DPP. Thus, I can not make any comment as to its abilities to handle RAW conversion. In addition, while I have used RAW a reasonable amount, I am far from what I would consider expert on the subject.
The software provided by Canon may, or may not, provide the best conversion. There are many examples where software that is not from the manufacturer provides more, and better, features (e.g. CHDK).
But anyway, I more and more suspect the sensor to be broken, since the artefacts show up in every converter and only in the S95 files.....
Could you make the RAW files of the pictures you took (dog and person's face) available for download? This would allow us to verify the problem.
The fact that you have artifacts in your conversion of the RAW file from dpreview which do not exist in either the conversion performed by dpreview, or the conversion I did of the same file, would indicate that there are definitely artifacts introduced in the process you are using to convert the RAW files. There may, or may not, be additional problems. However, there are certainly problems there.
If the example you provided of the dpreview file is from the jpeg of their raw conversion to which you applied "heavy sharpening", I could be wrong. While the crop of that image which you put up has been heavily sharpened, I was unable to reasonably duplicate the issues shown by just applying an unsharp mask filter to the dpreview provided jpeg.
Having access to the RAW files for your two pictures would help to be able to verify the problem.
Alternately, if you could provide similar crops without the "heavy sharpening", that would be helpful. As with many problems, this one might be easier to address if the multiple actions were looked at separately.
