No miracle! cannot get a very small zoom lense with top image quality. The 16-50 is clearly not as good as we could dream. Anyway:
- did you notice the RAW files are slightly wider than jpg? why? because the wide angle of this lense is not really 16mm, but rather 14mm… those 2 extra mm are clearly poor quality (soft, corner vigneting, strong distortion…), but they are not intented to be used as a part of the picture, but only to provide some required pixels for getting a proper 16mm after software correction! So, of course, if you consider the whole picture on a wide angle RAW file, you’ll be disapointed, but doing so, you are judging the lense for something that go beyong it’s official spécifications. Once corrected, the result is not that bad, and give a rael 16mm
- It’s not very fair to compare a prime lense (Voigtlander 20mm) and a zoom lense (especialy a pancake zoom). Of course the prime lense is sharper, that’s one of the 2 reasons why prime lenses still exist when we can build more versatile zooms (the other reason is max apertune)! It would have been more interesting to make a comparison with Sony or other brand 18-55 kit zoom, and with Panasonic 14-42X, that is not a very good lense too.