  Motivated by the requirement of a refined and flexible treatment of
electroweak corrections to the neutral current Drell-Yan process, we report on
recent developments on various input parameter/renormalization schemes for the
calculation of fully differential cross sections, including both on-shell and
MSbar schemes. The latter are particularly interesting for direct
determinations of running couplings at the highest LHC energies. The
calculations feature next-to-leading order precision with additional higher
order contributions from universal corrections such as $\Delta \alpha$ and
$\Delta \rho$. All the discussed input parameter/renormalization scheme options
are implemented in the package of POWHEG-BOX-V2 dedicated to the neutral
current Drell-Yan simulation, i.e. Z_ew-BMNNPV, which is used to obtain the
presented numerical results. In particular, a comprehensive analysis on
physical observables calculated with different input parameter/renormalization
schemes is presented, addressing the Z peak invariant mass region as well as
the high energy window. We take the opportunity of reporting also on additional
improvements and options introduced in the package Z_ew-BMNNPV after svn
revision 3376, such as different options for the treatment of the hadronic
contribution to the running of the electromagnetic coupling and for the
handling of the unstable Z resonance.
