The hulaboo about sharpness is really quite amusing. The best lenses available for sharpness in the 1990’s are bested by the cheapest lenses of the 2020’s. The only time you will notice a difference is when you print to 20 x 30. I have a printer that prints 300dpi at 13 x 19 inches and quite honestly I cannot tell any difference between the 24-240 and any other lens I own. I use a 45mp Canon R5 shooting raw or craw.

The lens companies keep making bigger and bigger and more expensive lenses so the pixel pokers can find tighter and tighter LPI.

People view photographs on a wall from 2-4 feet, not 3 inches. Photos in a book are rarely bigger than 8 x 10 and at the size you can get a decently sharp photo with an iPhone at 300dpi(the required sharpness of the famous coffee table magazine, Arizona Highways). In fact, we were all remarking at our recent Photo Show about the sharpness of a photo printed to 13 x 19, until the author told us she did it with her 15mp iPhone. We were astounded as we have all believed the hype from the camera lens manufacturers.

And the vignetting and pincushion, etc., are not signs of a bad lens. The lens was designed that way with the expectation that everyone would use corrected jpgs from the camera, or corrected RAWs from Affinity Photo, Lightroom, or Photoshop. Anyone who complains about this is also telling you that they don’t do any editing but still want to use raw. It's a non-issue.

As to the slow speed of the lens, Its also a non issue since it was designed for use by the R cameras especially the upcoming(at the time) R5/R6. With 5 stop IS and 3 more stops in the camera, you can easily handhold at 1/13s, get sale-able photos without need for any noise reduction at ISO 3000, and some noise reduction up to about ISO 5500. The slowness simply doesn’t matter or is even noticeable.

If you need to print to 20 x 30 inches and view the photo at 1200 dpi 6 inches away, by all means get the $3000 lens.