Canon Zoom Wide Angle-Telephoto EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Image Stabilizer USM Autofocus Lens

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).