I am still trying out a 30mm lens which gives me a crop factor of about a 45mm lens.  Sure, distortion from the smaller focal length is still there but how apparent is it?

I post these two images for your comparison. Since I use not in-camera sharpening, slight sharpening is applied but that is all besides crop and resize for web.  

Please take a look and see if there is really apparent difference enough to scrap the lens and try something else.  You see, one image is corrected for "barrel distortion", the aberration that makes straight lines go curved upward from the center, like looking at the side of a barrel.

This is how the correction was made and is not scientific or purist:  I took shots of a brick wall. The wall has fairly stright rows of bricks.  Then, curves at the top and bottom were supposed to be apparent or more apparent depending on the lens used.  The brick wall test showed a slight curve or barrel distortion at the closest focal point of the lens.  I corrrected that and applied the same setting to one of the bridge shots show here.

Do you see a significant difference?  Without comparison would you think one photo distorted? That is after the fact, oops, since both photos are here!

Any thoughts will be appreciated.               TomDArt.