Using the Canon RF 24-240mm f4-6.3 lens 13 May 2020

Canon’s first RF mount offerings  were mainly high end optics which had some users including myself asking where are the consumer lenses.

The first of these to come on the market is the 24-240mm f4-6.3 utility/travel/general purpose zoom.

This lens received considerable negative comment when reviewers first got their hands on it.

Uncorrected files show huge distortion and peripheral darkening at the wide end with  peripheral shading  and loss of sharpness at the long end.  

On the EOS R color fringing at the wide and long ends of the zoom range is so great I can see it in the viewfinder.

In practice these issues can be managed and the lens coaxed into delivering very good results in the middle of the zoom range and good-enough-for-most-purposes images at the wide and long ends of the range.

I offer users some suggestions:

For best results use Raw capture and process files through a Raw converter which has correction profiles for this lens.

I use Adobe Camera Raw (Lightroom has the same profiles).

On every frame I go to the Lens Corrections panel and apply [Remove chromatic aberration] and [Enable profile corrections] under the Profile tab.

It is often necessary to also go into the Manual tab and apply additional correction to color fringing.

Files from the long end of the zoom can look quite soft, depending on conditions such as atmospheric distortion and haze.

This appears to be mainly due to low contrast as resolution in a large central area of the frame is quite decent.

Direct sunlight helps bring up subject detail at full zoom.

I find it useful to explore options for sharpening by dragging the Amount, Radius and Detail sliders across to the right until the sharpening effect has obviously gone too far then pulling them back until the image looks more natural.