Canon 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM EF-S Review Round-Up
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Get information and user reviews for this lens from Amazon: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 Image Stabilized USM SLR Lens for EOS Digital SLRs
Photo Zone:
The EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 USM IS is a lens that promises many things. It is certainly a very versatile standard zoom with a long zoom range and an image stabilizer that can save the day in many situations. However, the build quality is somewhat disappointing and optically it is also something of a mixed bag. The lens is very sharp in the image center throughout the range but at the wide-end the extreme corners leave something to be desired. The 17mm setting also suffers from rather extreme distortions and rather hefty vignetting @ f/4. Finally chromatic aberrations aren’t really something to rave about either. So at the end of the day the lens is a tad better than the cheapo EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 but it can’t really compete with the new EF-S 18-55m f/3.5-5.6 IS or the EF 17-40mm f/4 USM L. The key feature of the EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 USM IS remains its versatility. While this may sound a little sceptical I should note that I preferred the lens compared to other higher quality options during testing – it is simply a darn convenient lens and despite the flaws it can produce very decent images as you can see from the samples – at least with a little tool support. READ FULL REVIEW