My latest camera purchase, per my Lens System Wishlist, was a Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS. After a few shoots, I’ve found to to be a good general purpose, walk around lens and replacement for the kit 18-55mm.
It’s a larger and heavier lens than the kit zoom, and the build quality is solid with a metal mount and good feel. Actually walking around with it around my neck this morning in Norristown Farm Park, I didn’t really notice the weight.
The zoom range is welcome, and one you only tend to see in EF-S and other lenses for small-sensor SLRs. Given that small-sensor cameras will continue to be cheaper and likely more numerous than full-frame ones for years to come means that there’s not much threat of EF-S lenses becoming obsolete. It doesn’t go beyond f4-5.6 to get you truly shallow depth of field, but as more of an outdoor walk around lens, it wasn’t missed.
Image stabilization is showing up on a growing number of consumer professional lenses, and I quickly realized why. Shooting indoors without a flash, you can handhold much longer exposures than usual. The advertised 3 f-stop advantage generally seems to be true. I bought mine used, so I don’t have the user manual to know if it automatically senses a tripod, but in a series of tripod comparison shots I didn’t notice much difference with it on or off.
I did do a lengthy series of comparison shots using the tripod, 17-85mm, 18-55mm, and 50mm f1.4 prime lenses at various f-stops and focal lengths. All were reasonably sharp at f8 and softened outside that. The 18-55mm kit lens softened more quickly than the 17-85mm, which also held up better at a mid-range 50mm zoom and maximum f5.6. The 50mm f1.4 prime softened a little, but still looked good at f22. I don’t have a quick way of posting 100% crops for comparison, but if you’re really curious, I’m happy to share them. Through the viewfinder, there’s a bit of vignetting on the corners at 17-24mm, but the actual images don’t show much that I can see.
Overall, it’s proving to be a worthy upgrade to the kit lens for general use.
del.icio.us/mbotos
