Comparison of the different distances used in this study. The comparison is done with respect to the d_PM distances. The discrepancies are small for small distances. For the case of the RC, we only compare stars with ϖ∕σ_ϖ > 3, since the rest of RC sources are not included in our set of d_PM. This is then misleading since for these stars the parallax retrieves better distances, but the real gain for the RC occurs exactly for the stars missing in this panel, in the regime where the photometric distances might be better thanthe ones from parallax alone. The peculiar shape shown in the inset of the top panel and present in the three top panels is composed of stars with large parallax error, for which the expectation values used in the d_PM estimation are larger than for instance the medians used in d_L.