Canon EF 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 USM Standard Zoom Lens for Canon SLR Cameras

I've had this lens for a few years now, and I absolutely love it. It is compact, sharp, and dependable. I'm a wide-angle shooter, so this one is just about perfect. Canon's USM is beautiful. Unlike Nikon, Canon seeks and achieves quiet, fast, and accurate auto focusing. Coupled with a light and quiet EOS camera body, and you've got an excellent documentary kit, great for shooting people in close and personal. At 24 mm, this lens gives excellent range for close work, with lots of depth and sharpness, making focusing and composing a cinch in evolving situations. My only gripe with this lens is its manual focus ring. I grew up with manual focus, and I love excercising that skill, but this lens has nothing more than an obligatory, plastic, and poorly placed focusing ring that discourages manual work. Fortunately, Canon's autofocusing system is phenomenal. Round-out your EOS kit with a Canon SpeedLite (compatible all the way down to 24 mm).

This lens is almost superb for its price! It's a middle-class lens, what appears in the following:

- it has bigger light-factor (3.5-4.0 vs 4.0-5.6 in the low-class lenses). This gives you more possibilities, for instance to use faster shutter speeds or to decrease the depth-of-fild for special effects)

- the first (outer) lens doesn't spin what gives you an opportunity to use square filters; using a poliriser becomes as easy as any other filter.

- the USM (Ultra Sonic Motor) gives you a really super speed of focusing and completely silent engine. You'll catch the fastest actions and nothing will distrub your object!

These are the most important and useful features of the lens. I should also admit, that the focal distance of this lens is almost ideal for everyday photography, because gives you an opportunity to shoot from landscapes (~24-50mm) to portraiture (~50-85mm) with an equal simplicity and quality.

This lens is very cheap as lenses go. I didn't realize it when I bought my Canon EOS 10D a couple years ago. I have had one complaint with this lens since I got it: not very sharp. Not having a lot of SLR experience I wasn't sure if the problem was the lens or the digital camera. Or was it the alorithms in the camera for convering the image to JPG? After all, sharpness is just one of the parameters you can set in the camera. So what I ended up doing was bumping the sharpness in the camera all the way up to get the kind of sharpness in the image I was looking for.

What I am talking about is, say, the edges around your subject's face are not sharp, or your daughter's freckles aren't quite crisp enough, etc.

So I tried a friend's L series Canon lens and got exactly what I was looking for: crisp, sharp, more like my eyes saw the image as I was taking the picture. So, in short, a really good lens that takes really sharp pictures costs a lot of money, 3 or 4 times what this lens costs. Sadly, I already bought one L series lens and it is so amazing I am now forced to buy another one.

But, I just wanted to write this review in case you were wondering why your otherwise awesome looking pictures are just not as sharp as you might have expected. This lens is great in all other aspects, and as I am realizing now, nice and light weight. But if you're obsessive like I apparently am, you might want to fork out more money for a better quality lens.

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