Stacey wrote:
bmoag wrote:

[barrel distortion] can be reasonably corrected with some simple
image processing in the brave new digital world.

But doing this causes a loss of image quality and sharpness so it
still is a problem.

Well, that depends. You have to do raw conversion anyway, so you can
do the distortion correction at the same time, at high resolution.
Will this lose quality over not doing any geometric correction at all?
A little, but will it be visible?

In the end it's all about cost and weight. Is it cheaper to make a
sharp zoom lens with some barrel distortion than one without? And is
the resulting digitally corrected lens quality better value for money
(and weight) than one without any digital correction?

I suspect that if you have, say, $500 to spend on a lens, you're going
to get better quality by a combination of lens design and digital
correction than the best lens design can possibly do in its own.

Andrew.