SUPERZOOMS FOR TRAVEL

Ideal for walkabout and holiday shooting, a good superzoom lens can handle pretty much any scene you point it at

- Matthew Richards

Whether you’re exploring city streets, trekking through the countryside or jetting off to the other side of the world, a bag full of lenses can feel like a real burden. A superzoom enables you to travel light, delivering everything from generous wide-angle coverage to serious telephoto reach, all in a single and relatively compact lens. As well as being more travel-friendly, a superzoom enables you to react instantly to photo opportunities that demand wide-ranging focal lengths with a simple flick of the wrist.

Sticking to just one lens might seem counter-intuitive if you’ve bought a system camera that takes interchangeable lenses, and some superzooms can be a poor substitute for using the ‘right’ tool for the job; inevitably, a massive zoom range comes with compromise in terms of outright image quality, while wide apertures are off the menu, especially towards the long end of the zoom range.

However, with advances in high-tech optical design, and the increasing availability of in-camera corrections for aberrations like lateral chromatic aberration, peripheral illumination and distortion, the latest superzoom lenses tend to be capable of very pleasing results. Here are the best options to suit a wide range of cameras.

Canon RF 24-240mm f/4-6.3 IS USM

£829/$899

Most superzooms are designed for cropsensor cameras; indeed, this is the only full-frame compatible lens in this test group. Canon does make an EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM for its full-frame DSLRs, but it hardly qualifies as a travel lens, tipping the scales at a hefty 1,670g; by contrast, this RF-mount lens weighs just 750g.