I have been using ACR so far to convert CR2s from my 350D (Rebel XT), but I have not been satisfied with the noise I get, so I read somewhere that the bundled ZoomBrowser EX Raw Image Task gets better results. 

However I am less than impressed with the controls on the ZoomBrowser , the saturation and contrast can only be controlled in 4 steps, and there are not controls for luminance, etc. like on Adobe Camera RAW. So what I've been doing so far is converting to 8bit TIFF in zoombrowser and then do all the addional adjustments in PS and then save as JPG. I am wondering though if there is a better/faster way?