[stoppingdown]

The past year, after Klaus' praises, I evaluated the DxO PureRAW 3 denoiser. It did a good job on a few critically noisy photos I shot. Before that evaluation I didn't think that I really needed a denoiser, but having tried one changed my mind. Then I left the trial expire because I didn't have the time to evaluate competing applications. One year and a half later I was able to do a round of comparative testing: Topaz Photo AI, On1 NoNoise AI and the latest DxO PureRAW 4. At this point I need to pick one and buy a license. My personal evaluation is that PureRAW is still the best of the pack: some competitors might produce sometimes sharper images, and maybe offer the capability of better sharpening when the problem is not noise, but slight mis-focusing; but often the images they produce look unnatural and/or there are digital artefacts. 

Anyway, before buying a license I'd like to hear your comments, if you have experience.

PS For people who are interested but never tried an evaluation, these might be two starting points — but consider that both the video and the post are from about seven/eight months ago and in the meantime more recent versions have been released, so you really need to try yourself. All the products have free trials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp5HIUmudAs

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1844182/0

[Klaus]

Other than noise reduction performance, it may be worth checking the speed.
DxO is superb in terms of NR, but even on my Macbook Pro Max, it is slowwww (ok, it's just an M1).

[stoppingdown]

Figure that I still own an Intel MBP... Yes, speed it's an issue, but fortunately I don't need to denoise lots of images.