So, which would you prefer:
- an optically corrected lens with many compromises in ALL optical qualities,
or
- a moderately distorted lens with SOME exceptional optical qualities and auto-digital corrections in post
Bonus points:
Which optical qualities would you like corrected at what stage?
For example:
For normal and telelens, I would personally have little problem with a plane distorted lens, as long as it has perfectly consistent colorbalance and exquisite OOF drawing. If it is a wide angle, I would prefer it to be sharp, but I have found that I don't mind chromatic aberrations so much, ever since being able to correct those automatically in post.
From what little I have seen of the RX100 RAW files, it is a slightly barrel distorted lens, with slight chromatic aberration, but it seems to produce pretty good "drawing". So, perhaps the engineers have chosen to keep some of the distortions which can easily be mitigated digitally, in favor of other optical qualities and cost?