A zoom lens with a big range is what many people are looking for when they upgrade from the kit lens they got with their SLR. As a result the Canon EF-S 18-200mm IS lens will be one that many people will consider when looking to upgrade.
Canon have pitched this lens firmly at the ‘all day’ lens crowd for people who want a truly all purpose walk around lens. On a standard cropped sensor slr camera such as the Rebel XSi 450D the effective focal length of this lens is 29mm-320mm which is a massive increase from the standard kit lens (18mm-55mm).
Canon EF-S 18-200mm IS Features
Aperture ranges from f3.5-f5.6 which is pretty good considering the massive focal range. One nice bonus is the front ring doesn’t rotate meaning you can add filters without a problem.
The lens also incorporates Image Stabilization to help avoid blurred images caused by camera shake. As is the way with Canon IS the feature is visible through the view finder making it much easier to compose your shots, despite being zoomed in.
This lens is not compatible with full frame cameras so if you think you may upgrade at some point in the future it may not be for you, unless you have deep pockets.
Build Quality
The actual mount is made of metal with the barrel and rest of the lens made from tough plastics, making it feel much better quality that the 18-55mm kit lens. There are switches on the side for Auto/Manual focus, Image Stabilization and a zoom lock which is a nice feature missing from the Nikon 18-200mm. Though it feels a solid lens there are some noticeable downsides to the build quality of this lens.
Firstly there is no USM motor meaning that the auto focus is fairly noisy, however to be fair it does tend to focus relatively quickly. On it’s own this is not the end of the world however an added annoyance is that the manual focus ring turns when using the auto focus. This can be annoying and we found ourselves having to adjust our grip several times after switching to auto. That said you would soon adapt to not holding the lens using the focus ruing if you use AF a lot.
Lens Performance
This is a good little lens. However it’s relatively low price means that there will be areas where it is not so great. Under out tests the image quality was much better at the telephoto end rather than the wide end. The weaknesses at the wide end include some barrel distortion, , chromatic aberration and not as much sharpness. When zoomed however the lens performs really well with nice sharp images, a soft bokeh and good colour reproduction.
The above negatives are however expected as you simply can’t make a perfect all round lens for this sort of money. The main benefit is the huge optical range you get which means that you really can walk around with this lens all day and photograph a huge variety of types of photographs without having to swap lenses. The image stabilization works very well enabling you to take sharp images when fully zoomed in.
If you are looking to upgrade your kit lens and yearn for more zoom this really is a good option for the money. Check out the latest prices for this lens on Amazon here.
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I have been using this lens for almost a year now and have been very impressed with it in my role taking photos of school events with a canon 1000D. This often means I only have a split second to frame and take shots which might be close up posed photos to action on the field or stage. Results are the same or better that the kit 18-55mm and 70-300mm zoom. It does help that I use a 550 speedlite flash for most of the indoors work but even without it low light performance is not too bad. It will be nice to see the results with my, hopeful, future upgrade to a 7D.