The next lens – Part 2
I’ve narrowed the field down to a few lenses and I think that I’m in the home stretch.
The front runners are:
- Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM
- Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0 L USM
- Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8…
If price were no object then I’m pretty sure that I’d get the Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM. But it costs about $1500 and that is a bit beyond what I can reasonably justify. Even the EF-S 17-55, coming in at around grand is a pricey.
And really, there is the crux of the issue- the EF-S 17-55 is the lens I want, but I’m not sure that I want to spend that much – especially since the Tamron has pretty much the same image quality results for about half the price. It doesn’t have image stabilization or a USM (or equivalent) but as I mentioned it costs about half as much as the Canon EF-S 17-55.
I would appreciate any thoughts that anyone may have- Thanks!
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This post has 3 comments
February 8th, 2008
Brett — Faced with a similar decision, I picked door #2 and bought the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4.0 L USM. Good price. Keeps my full frame options open (since it will last a lifetime). I’m fine with the f/4.0 for several reasons: I’ll use it mainly for outdoors, and for landscapes — where I’ll probably want f/8 anyhow (!) and as ISOs improved on future cameras, its light performance will improve. (I’m shooting right now on the Rebel XT, and will probably get the 50D when it comes out…. Good luck, let us know what you do! -FJ Glynn
February 11th, 2008
Not that I have either lens, but my advice would be to go for the Canon EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS USM. I haven’t done the research, but the lower f-stop and image stab would be worth the money to me…if I had it to spend.
Oh btw…hi.
February 14th, 2008
I was in a similar boat just earlier this year. I was deciding on different 17-55 range glass. One thing I did that helped me really understand which one I really liked was this. I went to the local camera store and asked them if I could check each one out. Luckly they had the ones that I was concidering. Now the kicker is, at least in my neck of the woods is that the store is very brightly lit. So there’s not much of a challenge for glass to autofocus, and performance it great. I couldn’t really see any difference between the ones I was looking at. The price differnce was a factor of 2-3. Problem is, I wasn’t going to be using this in a brightly lit room. I was going to shoot a wedding in a darkened chapel. So I kindly asked the saleswoman if I could take it to the back room which was about 8 stops difference in brightness. That’s where the performance was night and day difference. Also the Tamron glass was VERY noisy poking around in the dark. It was not something that I wanted.
Long story short, by pocketbook got about $1500 lighter that day (after tax, etc).
I don’t regret it.