24-240mm should i keep or sell for 50mm and 35mm prime

Karl_Guttag wrote:

smartslr wrote:

Hi Team,

I got eos rp with 24-240mm in blackfriday deal eos rp and lens for 1037including tax (moved from nikon fullframe d750 to mirrorless canon )

getting the camera via friend in usa am from india. lot of negative reviews for the lens with vignette and crop. keh takes the lens for 540

should i sell the lens and get a 50mm or 35mm prime

planning to setup canon mirrorless setup will get r5 after a year is it a good lens to the setup or should i take up the trade

im mostly in to portrait photography and landscape at times or should i keep the lens its worth for 500$ kindly help me

any help will be greatly appreciated kindly excuse the bad English and grammar.

Lens choices are a very personal matter. Everyone shoots different subjects with different preferences and with different budgets. I'm not sure what reviews you are reading, but the RF24-240 is well-liked by many people, myself included on this forum, as a general-purpose walk-around lens. Search this forum for RF24-240, and you will find many more people praising the lens.

Many of the "bad reviews" were early on, where they looked at the uncorrected wide-angle view with a Photoshop RAW converter. The lens definitely has a lot of distortion correction at the wide end, which does cost resolution in the corners, but surprisingly (to me anyway), the contrast is still very good (I put this down to the lens being designed to have good contrast as the expense of linearity).

I got my RF24-240 as part of a kit with the RP. I liked both so much that I ended up getting R5 and many RF-L lenses (15-35f2.8, 24-70f2.8, 70-200f2.8, 100f2.8 macro, 100-500). When I pack a bag to go out shooting, the RF24-240 is always in the bag, and I will drop some of the other lenses based on what I am shooting. The RF24-240 is always there just in case, and it also works well for me as the lens I put on the RP as a backup camera. The 10x zoom range with fast AF and great IS makes it a great utility lens.

The RF24-240 is very sharp in the center. Even though it loses sharpness in the corners, it still has high contrast. Its sweet spot is from about 70-135mm and does get soft in the corners at both ends of the zoom range. It does lose resolution in the corners at the wide end with the distortion correction, and that resolution can't be gotten back by stopping down.

It has USM AF, which is much better than Canon's STM in my experience, and has exceptionally good image stabilization, something particularly important with the RP camera. Both the RF35mm and all the RF50mm don't have stabilization.

The RF 35 F1.8 does have stabilization. The 50s don't, though.

That said, it is not the lens I would pick for either portrait or landscape photography. Another factor is losing about 45% of its value on a trade-in.

What 50mm are you thinking about getting? It has been tough for people who don't want or cannot afford the RF50f1.2. The RF50f1.8 has slow STM focusing, is a bit soft in the corners, and loses wide open contrast. Still, many seem happy with it. The other option is adapting 3rd party adapted EF 50mm f1.4 lens. I consider the lack of a good RF50mmf1.4 with USM focusing as a big hole in the RF lineup. The other way to go for portraits is the RF85f2. It is very sharp but does sometimes suffer with the STM focusing.

spec68 wrote:

smartslr wrote:

Hi Team,

I got eos rp with 24-240mm in blackfriday deal eos rp and lens for 1037including tax (moved from nikon fullframe d750 to mirrorless canon )

getting the camera via friend in usa am from india. lot of negative reviews for the lens with vignette and crop. keh takes the lens for 540

should i sell the lens and get a 50mm or 35mm prime

planning to setup canon mirrorless setup will get r5 after a year is it a good lens to the setup or should i take up the trade

im mostly in to portrait photography and landscape at times or should i keep the lens its worth for 500$ kindly help me

any help will be greatly appreciated kindly excuse the bad English and grammar.

I have the RF 24-240 and 50 1.8 (used w/ the R5). I don't use either regularly, the former is my general travel lens and I bought the 50 when I bought my R5 to "get to know the camera" before I installed my much heavier 100-500, which is now my main lens.

Short answer: no, I don't think selling the 24-240 for these two lenses makes sense. They are faster, yes, but I wouldn't say optically superior even though they are primes, and they have (the clunky) STM AF mechanism. I've never used the RF 35mm but the 50 1.8, while a good value, has a tendency to produce visible-to-the-naked-eye purple fringe

Both LR and DXO clear up the purple fringing automatically.

I don't see in the 24-250 or 100-500 used in the same situations.

I've have a lot of keepers with my 24-240. Vinetting is not bad at all -- just stay away from the extremes as you would any budget zoom. Using in manual focus is awkward because there is no dedicated manual switch on the lens, but that's true of the 50mm 1.8 too. That's the biggest negative to me. Otherwise the lens works great with the R5's AF. Quick and accurate. It's a great "catch-all" lens for the R5, though, honestly, if you are spending that much on a camera, I would budget for a good L lens for your main photography. I only have the 15-35 and 100-500 so can't really recommoned which standard or mid-zoom to buy.

One last note - if you decide to keep the 24-240 I highly recommend buying a lens hood. You can get an inexpensive no-name branded one on Amazon for around $15.

JustUs7 wrote:

JPAlbert wrote:

Portrait and landscape?

Why not the 24-105 F4L ?

Wider end for landscapes if you need it. 35-105 for portraits...

F4 is not 2.8 or 1.8, but will still get the job done.

Because the OP picked up the whole kit (camera included) for a little over a grand and appears to be shopping for something they can get for less than the 24-240 on a trade in or with the proceeds from selling it. Not for an $1,100 ‘L’ lens.

I know budgets don’t exist for a lot of participants on these forums, but one should be able to read into a question a bit. All alternatives the OP is looking at are less than $500. Double that is a lot of money for some folks.

He also talked about upgrading to an R5 in the future, so I think some of the comments are taking that into consideration. If an R5 is considered, a RF24-105L shouldn't be out of consideration.