Which zoom (55-200 or 50-230)

jturn00 wrote:

I ended up buying the 55-200. It arrives Friday. I leave next week for a business trip to chile/Argentina. I might bring it along with the 18-55 and 27 f2.8. Let's see how much I have to carry.

Your thread combined with the recent sale stirred up my interest in filling the zoom gap in my Fuji system. In the past, I've found the Canon consumer zooms most suitable for traveling due to weight.

After many test shots over the weekend, the 50-230 has exceeded my expectations. It is surprisingly sharp across the frame unlike consumer zooms from other brands that tend to go mushy in the corners or edges. The zoom action is also extremely smooth unlike other brands or even Fuji's own 16-50 and has just the right amount of effort. I truly believe that the only XC vs XF trade-off is plastic build and slower glass, not image quality. RAW images show extremely low levels of chromatic aberrations which are automatically removed in JPG.

I prefer setting aperture using the thumb-wheel over a ring on the lens when it comes to zooms because one is primarily rotating the zoom when shooting. It would slow me down to have to shift hand position to adjust aperture...much quicker to adjust zoom with wrist and adjust aperture with fingertips simultaneously with the 50-230. I never did understand the merit of an aperture ring on the lens if it isn't labelled with the f-stops. The value of seeing at a glance the aperture setting is completely lost.

Some initial pics (processed in LR from RAW):