My recent attempt to shoot with a set of primes while traveling wasn't quit nice. Either it's too much trouble or time consuming to change lens, or I'm getting to lazy :) In the end I found a used copy (the street price of this lens has gone up quite a bit due to exchange rate) of 17-35mm and had Nikon restore it back to proper condition. Optically it's nowhere near the 14-24mm and there's no weather sealing either. On the plus side it's smaller, lighter, ghosting resistant, and the focal length covers around 90% of my travel needs. So far my impressions of this lens are as follow: Soft extreme corners don't go away at wilder settings, even if you stop down to f11, but stop down to certain extend does make it less visible. You need to stop down more at wilder focal length, such as f8 at 17mm, f5.6 at 20mm, f4 at 28 mm. Center resolutions is always good, there's no problem here. Close focusing of this lens is very good, I don't see the drop in sharpness. Distortion is especially noticeable at 17mm. The color rendition is not as vivid as 14-24mm, the image also lacks the 3-D look in comparison. It's still a pretty good lens once stopped down enough, and it will be my first choice for traveling. I suppose one could always dream for a 14-24 like update from Nikon, but I really doubt it will be as compact size-wise. One interesting thing is the front element is close to the filter enough such that my regular B+W filter doesn't cause any vignetting.