Originally posted by buttons My beef with the kit lens is that its quite sharp around 24mm and falls off quickly past 35mm based on the sharpness chart at dpreview.com.
Seems like most people prefer 50-75mm lenses for portraits so i would recommend the 90mm which will give you some more distance between you and your subject and maybe soften the popup flash even more. Just an idea from someone who has no real experience :-)
We don't know what these photos will be used for, but having that last ounce of sharpness isn't always necessary, or even desirable, for portraits. In any case, the corners and edges are usually unimportant in portraits, and often the greatest differences in lens performance are in the corners and edges.
I tend to think that 90mm is a bit long for portraits; with my Spotmatic I used to have to choose between my 50mm and 135mm Takumars, and I'd usually go with the 50, maybe cropped a little, because the 135 resulted in somewhat of a flattened portrait. A 90 or 105 would have been good.
Paul