burningheart wrote:
In my opinion the 20-50 would pair nicely with the 14-35.
I'd be curious about your thinking on this. In my mind this lens may well replace the 14-35 and 24-105 for general travel use. In recent years I've been finding myself on family trips to European cities like Rome, Paris, and London instead of the more wildlife oriented travel I prefer. On the Italy trip I used the R7 with the 14-35 (22-55 equiv) and this worked pretty well. For London I found the 18-150 (29-240) wide end limiting for city walk around and then switched to the 18-50 f2.8 for museums.
On the R5 this range should cover most of my needs inside museums and outside for buildings and landscapes. It should pair well with the 70-200 f4 L making for a little over 4 lb kit. I'm also hoping with the R5's 45 MP and the 20-50's excellent MTF at 50 that I'll be able to crop 1.5 for 75mm reach and 1:2 magnification. Then I could use it to replace the 16, 35, and 24-105 and pair it with the magic 100-500. I doubt I'll ever use the PZ.
This is OT but I think of general interest. We're recently back from the England trip where we spent a week in London and then a week on the Cotswold Way. We had 95˚F temperatures in London and it rained on us each day in the Cotswolds. The rain was better than heat but I was reticent to use the fragile 18-150 in the rain so I ended up using my iPhone most of the time. I think I would be more willing to use the weather sealed 20-50.
I used the Adobe Project Indigo camera app on my iPhone 15 and it worked really well. The PI app takes multiple images like Live Mode on the camera app but combines them to a single image in creative ways like HDR. It has more Canon like colors and puts out a DNG that Lightroom likes. It only puts out a 12 MP image native to the iPhone lenses. For intermediate focal lengths like 50 or macro, it uses the slight hand shake to increase resolution and still output 12 MP. For my use I cropped to 16:9 and had to use Topaz Photo to upscale the images to the 2880 pixel height of my display. I was pleased that I came away with quite useable images. I have to do similar if I use crop mode on my R5 (1.6) but have had pretty good results with the light 18-150 lens. This gives me hope for the 20-50. I'll probably program the button on the lens to bring up the crop mode menu.
Jun 25, 2026 at 11:00 AM
Steve Spencer Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
Jeff Nolten wrote:
I'd be curious about your thinking on this. In my mind this lens may well replace the 14-35 and 24-105 for general travel use. In recent years I've been finding myself on family trips to European cities like Rome, Paris, and London instead of the more wildlife oriented travel I prefer. On the Italy trip I used the R7 with the 14-35 (22-55 equiv) and this worked pretty well. For London I found the 18-150 (29-240) wide end limiting for city walk around and then switched to the 18-50 f2.8 for museums.
On the R5 this range should cover most of my needs inside museums and outside for buildings and landscapes. It should pair well with the 70-200 f4 L making for a little over 4 lb kit. I'm also hoping with the R5's 45 MP and the 20-50's excellent MTF at 50 that I'll be able to crop 1.5 for 75mm reach and 1:2 magnification. Then I could use it to replace the 16, 35, and 24-105 and pair it with the magic 100-500. I doubt I'll ever use the PZ.
Mine gets delivered tomorrow, We shall see....Show more →
I think it will work well for my travel use too. I plan to pair it with the Voigtlander RF mount 40 f/1.2, so I have an option with a faster aperture and with a longer high quality lens (likely the Voigtlander M mount 90 f/4 APO Lanthar). I don't want wider than 20mm often, but I will probably pick up the Sigma EF mount 14-24mm f/2.8 which is a nice performing lens and pretty inexpensive at this point.
Yes, I carried a Voightlander 20 prime for years in my EF days and it served me well. With the R5 the RF 16 could easily be cropped up to the 24. I'm looking forward to having 20mm available without lens change - when traveling I'm usually with a non-photography group. And in crowds, on buses, subways, and trains a smaller kit is always welcome.
We shall see.