stevei
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 p.1 #1 · 17-85 EF-S IS - my first impressions | |
I've had this lens for a couple of days now. I've used it to just walk around and take a few pictures and also done some comparison shots with the 50 f/1.4 and the 17-40 L. For various reasons, I don't want to post any pics just yet - I'll take some more pics at the weekend, and try to get a few samples that I think are representative of the good and bad points. At the moment I haven't used it enough to form a definitive conclusion on the image quality, and hence I can't say that any specific individual pictures would give a fair overall impression. As some people might be considering this lens, I thought I'd just share what I can safely say at this stage:
- The lens feels reasonably well made, it's about the same weight as the 17-40, and there's no wobble of the front element, even when fully extended out. Well, perhaps a very slight bit of movement, but I really do mean very slight, it feels much better made than the 18-55, or the 50 1.8 II, say. It zooms with a double extension action that looks very much like the 70-300 DO's, so it isn't really built to withstand a wet or dusty environment. There's no movement of the front element whatsoever during focusing, and the front element doesn't rotate during zooming.
- The manual focus action is a bit poor. It feels much more like the micro-USM on the 50 1.4 than the ring USM on better lenses.
- When I took some test pictures indoors, it was wider at the same focal length than the 17-40 and 50 1.4. This was when focused just a few feet away, though, it might be different at infinity. Also, I only compared to the 17-40 at 40mm, so the difference might disappear at the wider end. The exif confirmed the reported focal lengths as 41mm and 50mm, but the pictures clearly had a wider field of view. One to investigate further.
- The image quality seems reasonable. It is definitely soft wide open, but improves noticeably at f/8, and is really not bad at all at f/11. At f/5.6, from my tests so far, it looks significantly softer than the 17-40 or 50 1.4, but didn't fare too badly at all when compared at f/8 or f/11.
- The IS doesn't have mode 1 and 2, just on or off.
- What a joy to have this zoom range with IS on a 1.6 crop DSLR. There have been third party offerings that offer similar or longer ranges, but none of those have IS. I took a picture at sunset at ISO 100 1/20th sec handheld that didn't have any camera shake blur. Without IS, I'd have needed to increase the ISO to perhaps 400, which would have given me less ability to lift the shadow detail in the RAW later. To me, IS is very useful as a partial tripod replacement, even on wider lenses.
- I have seen some examples of fairly serious purple fringing at highlights, only at wider angles, and only towards the edge of the frame. This one definitely needs more tests before I can draw definite conclusions, it may have just been something about the subject that would have given the same effect with other lenses, I only saw it in one set of pictures that I took of the same scene at different focal lengths.
As I said, some sample / test pictures will follow at some point over the weekend.
Steve
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