It is now generally accepted that the performance of the 16-35 f4 falls off between 16-18 and 32-35 mm. If it had been produced as an 18-35 it would probably have had excellent performance across the full focal length range and been smaller and lighter. It seems that Nikon went to 16mm so that the lens would have a wider minimum focal length than the Canon 17-40, and therefore the 16-35 suffers the same problems as that lens in having a poorer performance at each end of the focal length range.
Now with the rumoured announcement of the 24-120 f4, are Nikon about to give us another lens with a noticeably worse performance at both ends of the zoom range, and also bigger & heavier than it need to be, than if they produced a 28-105 or 28-120 with superb optical quality across its full focal length range? Also why bother to have such a wide overlap between the 16-35 and 24-120, surely this will mean that most buyers will settle for one or the other at the wide end so they will only sell one lens instead of two
It seems to me that with the new fixed f4 range Nikon have moved to a 'never mind the quality, feel the width' policy instead of a 'the width is a bit narrow, but look at the quality' policy. What are others thoughts on this?
