Architectural photography, large product photography, interior photography, and birthday parties form a random list of 20mm uses.

I mean, I guess? I use the RF35mm F1.8 Macro IS STM a lot for what I do around here which I believe charitably counts as “product photography,” and I’m struggling to come up with a good justification as to why you’d pay 3.7 times more just for .4 more of an f-stop, an extra control ring, and a button.

When you’re doing static photography of objects like that in a controlled environment, using a mondo wide aperture is usually not very appealing anyway because you want to be able to get as much of your product in focus all in one go as possible, unless you want to play with focus stacking all the time. And as ever your sharpest picture is not likely to be found at the extreme wide end of the aperture range anyway. A stationary subject and a stationary camera with controlled lighting gives you the luxury of using whatever long exposure time you choose in order to get the result you want, from any distance you want, with the iris stopped down as appropriate. For me my lens is never the limitation; rather, it’s the size of my illumination box.

Does anyone have a compelling use case for the additional handful of additional controls vs. a massively expensive lens that’s going to have, at the end of the day, pretty trivially different optical performance from the existing RF24mm F1.8 IS STM for most people’s purposes, especially for walkaround street duty, when the latter is not only significantly less expensive but is also stabilized for those of us without the depth of pockets required for one of the newest in-body stabilized cameras to begin with? I’m not personally seeing the appeal for this one. I think I’d take the latter and keep the change – all $1250 of it.