Wes Gibbon wrote:bfitzgerald wrote:I'm not sure I can agree with that strategy surely it's best to try to get as good as you can optics wise off the bat, so to speak?
Well, yes but that is rather purist! All lens designs have to be a compromise. As well as reducing cost, reducing the amount of glass reduces weight and size, which is partly the selling point of the E-mount systems. Besides, most if bot all wide-angle lemses, particularly zooms, have some distortion anyway which may benefit from correction later.
Yes, you still end up needing to correct distortion if you want perfection, even WITH the additional glass in place. Introducing additional lenses in order to correct optically introduces various distortions, so you solve one problem and introduce others. Software correction is a valid, if a bit risky, solution.
One advantage I can think of that I don't see other people mention is that with some photos, you might not mind the distortion and you can dial in less correction and perhaps gain additional resolution in the process.
The 16-50mm kit lens is remarkably compact. When switched off it scarcely extends further than a pancake and is just about pocketable when mounted on a NEX body. Without software correction I doubt if the distortion would be acceptable.
The distortion of the 18-105 seems pretty strong, and I'm not sure it'd be acceptable most of the time, but I did try experimenting with the above trick -- applying less correction -- and while it might be an option, most of the time, I'd expect to use the corrections.
bfitzgerald wrote:If lenses got a lot cheaper I might have some time for it, but a lot of those newer E mount lenses are pretty saucy price wise.
I agree with you about the price of some E-mount lenses.
They seem to fall into three groups:
a) Kit lenses when sold separately are overpriced (DK recons it's a cynical ploy to make the kit seem better value!)
b) The more commonly purchased lenses are reasonable though not actually cheap e.g. 55-200, the Sony f1.8 primes, pancakes, and 30mm macro)
c) the less popular lenses are horrendous (e.g. Zeiss and the 10-18mm). Probably Sony are squeezed here because they don't have the market share that Canon & Nikon have so they have to include more of the development costs in the selling price. Of course that reduces demand even further but it's probably a tricky balancing act to play - although you may make a profit on each unit sold if you don't sell enough to recoup the development costs you end up making a loss
I would think economies-of-scale would be the main reason the lens prices are a bit high, but perhaps we're spoiled from A-mount. The past couple of times I went lens-shopping with a Canon-owning friend, I found Canon to be expensive. They have like a couple of cheap primes (and, IMHO, 40mm is an awful focal length for APS-C), and everything else seems to be hundreds of dollars.
Sony needs to do what they feel they need to survive, and we can buy into the brand that gives us the features we prefer. I prefer the smaller package, nice handling, DMF, and really, Sony lenses just seem really well built.
But the bottom-line is, how does it look? I did a quick test, but it's notoriously difficult to put together a really good test. So, it may be imperfect, but it is what it is. My conclusion thus far is that it's better than the 16-50, but not as good as the 20mm pancake. I've gotten fine photos from the 16-50, so I hope to get better results overall from the 18-105. But I think the flexibility of the bigger zoom range combined with f4 will make the lens useful, even aside from sharpness differences. The color and bokeh seem better than the kit lenses as well, which is another thing that is strikingly noticeable even in photos that aren't zoomed into 100% view.
So, use the kit lens or use primes, but if you want a better zoom, they are now available. Whether or not it's worth it is up to each individual.
