Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM

Easy to use, quick to auto focus and very sharp pictures. I'm very impressed with it's performance in low light as I prefer to avoid using the flash. Very happy.

I have had this lens for around 4 years now & have taken at least 8,000 photos with it. Compact, fairly light weight, & easy to use makes it an ideal walk around lens for shooting close to medium range subjects. Build quality is actually quite good & the lens is very reliable under varying conditions. It focuses fairly quickly & accurately for a f4.0 lens even under low light conditions, although manual focusing is better in this case to avoid too much auto focus hunting. Picture quality is generally quite good, but there's a couple of things to be aware of. 1) Colour reproduction is typically 'Canon good', but the lens is subject to a fair amount of chromatic abberation/purple fringing especially under bright high contrast situations. Even pro quality software will have difficulty correcting it.

2) Images are mostly sharp in the middle 75% while progressively becoming softer towards the outer edges with noticeable loss of detail, mostly in the corners. Not too disappointing unless you're really fussy.

3) Wide angle covers an amazing area, but squeezing it all into 17mm means a lot of distortion (edge curling) on the outer edges of a photo... also difficult to correct the aspect ratio using software. The best usable range for this lens would be about minimum 22mm - 85mm.

This lens represents good value for money for its intended all round general purpose use under normal lighting conditions. Easy to use with generally good quality photos, although you need to understand the various semi-auto & manual mode/focus settings of your camera to make the most of it. I'm still quite happy with it's performance.