Originally posted by sbc I am still waiting here for a post from your new lens!
Sorry about that. I have a few images on the card in the camera, but haven't fired up my home PC yet. We've been working from home for over a year now, and my home office space is taken up by work stuff, which means I just don't get around to clearing up enough space for the image processing.
I have tested the lens at f/2.8 for close-up photography of some flowers in the garden, and came away impressed with the bokeh. It so nice, that I might forego packing a fixed focal length lens for that purpose in future. The lens is really good wide open, but I already wrote that.
I the news thread I also wrote that handling the lens on a non-gripped camera is surprisingly comfortable. Normally for such a large and heavy lens, using a grip would seem most practical, but the lens is just beefy enough to align nicely with the bottom of a gripless camera, and as such is can rest flat in the extended palm of a left hand. That makes it easy to hold in a balanced way without the weight of the grip.
One more thing is distortion. At 16mm the lens is not distortion free, as can be expected. There is some barrel distortion and a little bit of moustache too. Much less than in the old version though. I'm looking forward to a lens profile in Adobe Lightroom for this and to see the impact of this correction on corner resolution to evaluate the lens for architecture. I am optimistic about this though.