 Great starter do-everything lens 62 of 66 people found this review helpful.
So you have a shiny new SLR, (or at least, a new-to-you SLR) and you need a lens. I've recommended this lens to many people due to its solid performance across a wide range and the image stabilization. Plus, it's quite affordable. I swap lenses all the time and it really is quite a hassle. This lens is great for backyard picnics, where you'll be both close and far from your subjects in a medium-size environment. I brought this to the zoo once and it just didn't have the reach to fill an animal in the frame, even with the 1.6x crop factor. However, I noticed it was perfect for photographing the parents and kids around me! As it got darker, the IS worked quite well.
If you're going to get just ONE lens, I highly recommend this lens if you have a Canon 10D or earlier. If you have a Rebel, Rebel XT, or 20D and you want to compensate for the 1.6x crop, the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS is the alternative. I would have gone for this option, but I was seeking a lens for my Canon 10D, which cannot use EF-S lenses.
Review ID: 10000000000005159  Thank you for voting. If your vote meets our guidelines, it will be posted within 24 hours. You cannot vote on the helpfulness of a review you wrote. Your request cannot be processed at this time. Please try again later.   My favorite walk around lens 52 of 56 people found this review helpful.
I picked this lens up with my initial camera purchase as it fit my favorite shooting range. It has quickly become one of my favorite walk around lenses and coupled with IS you can’t go wrong. I find this to be the ideal lens for my outdoors, family events and vacations. It was perfectly suited for a recent trip to Disney and almost exclusively used. I was perfect for capturing all the daily events and with IS still being able to hand hold the camera and capture night time shows, fireworks, and indoor 'Character Meals' with almost all the pictures coming out sharp and clear (wish I could attach samples to show just how sharp).
Image quality produced of both color and sharpness are really very good with this particular lens. It is very close to the infamous L-Series glass falling only slightly shorter on color saturation/tonal depth, but still creating very accurate renditions. I have found sharpness only starts to have a noticeable difference at about 300% magnification when I compared similar shots taken with an L at the same focal distance. And I know, build quality doesn't equal L, but it is much better than most other non-L lenses. With USM, it is also very quiet with autofocus being fairly quick.
I have been very happy with this lens any time I have used it and for the price I would recommend it to anyone looking at it. I had seen a suggestion to the 17-85mm IS for true non-crop range. Personally I found the 17-85 lens to have too much barrel distortion for me to live with which is why I ruled it out quickly.
If I had any complaints one would be that there is an extremely minute amount of stiffness in the zoom ring, so that it almost feels as though it might stick …but it doesn’t. The other would be that I wished it started at 24mm end or slightly lower, but then that would make it compete too much with Canon’s 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at more than half the price.
I gave this an excellent rating, because it would take a lens more than twice the price to give you better. And for non-pro situations many people don't need that level of build quality and overly clear sharpness (you won't see it in a 4X6 or 5X7 print).
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