A Good Walkaround Lens!

I bought the 17-85 f/4-5.6 IS USM lens bundled with a new Canon EOS 30d from B&H roughly 3 months ago. In these first few months, I've learned a number of things about this lens. Traditionally, I come from a background of 35mm film cameras and hard-metal lens, hence when I unwrapped this lens, I was surprised. Although part of the lens is metal, the majority of it is plastic. The lens is lightweight, but feels cheap in hand. The front end of the lens extends as the focal length is changed, which gets annoying. If the lens is facing downward on your camera, it will slide while walking. This is annoying if you try to keep it at a set focal length. The cheap plastic build also lets in some dust and dirt, which thankfully I have been able to clean out.

As for the optical quality, it's great. Colors have come out vibrant and saturated. I had heard that this lens has had some past trouble rendering true "red" colors, but I haven't had this problem.

The Image Stabilization (IS) is a nice feature. I've found that I can slow the shutter speed a stop or two and still achieve acceptable photos. It's especially helpful for me when shooting basketball in dark high school gyms. It allows me to shoot around ISO 800 at 1/100th of a second, when normally I would be forced to bump us the ISO. I've found that the IS gyroscope makes an audible noise; it isn't annoying, but it is one more noise to consider while shooting in quiet situations.

One problem that I've found with this lens is the lens hood (model EW-73B). It works well for every day use, but suffers when one uses the 30D's onboard flash. At wide focal lengths (such as 17mm), the hood casts a shadow over the lower portion of the frame. This is a problem that could be fixed with a different lens hood.

As I mentioned, this lens has a really nice range. 17mm at the wide end is really good, and 85 isn't bad for portraits, either. It's an EF-S lens, which means that it only fits 1.6x crop cameras (like the 30D, 20D, XTi, etc). EF-S is cool because it lets you get a true wide angle, without distortion.

My only other complaint about this lens is it's f4 aperture. I wish it would be a 2.8, but thats just me :)

Overall, a good walkaround lens for the cost. I recommend upgrading as soon as this lens stops serving your needs.

Feel free to ask me any questions--I can also provide image samples.