I have written a getter that opens a file and always regretted it later. Nowdays I would never solve that problem by lazy-constructing through the getter - period. There's the issue of getters with side-effects where people don't expect all kinds of crazy activity to be going on behind the getter. Furthermore you probably have to ensure thread safety, which can further pollute this code. Unit-Testing can also become slightly harder each time you do this.
Explicit construction is a much better solution than all sorts of lazy-init getters. It may be because I'm using DI frameworks that give me all of this as part of the standard usage patterns. I really try to treat construction logic as distinctly as possible and not hide too much, it makes code easier to understand.
