  We discuss a recent paper by Schlichenmaier & Franz (SF; 2013, A&A, 555,
A84), in which the claim is made that the penumbral dark downflows detected for
the first time with the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) by Scharmer et al.
and Joshi et al. could be produced by overcompensation for straylight. We show
that the analysis of SF is fundamentally flawed, because it ignores the
constraints on the strength of such straylight from 3D convection simulations
and on the spatial extent of the straylight point spread function from the
measured minimum intensity in the sunspot umbra. Furthermore, we show that the
claim made by SF, that the spatial straylight of Hinode is less than 10%, is
false. We conclude that the analysis of SF is of no relevance in relation to
the straylight compensation method applied to the SST data.
