Canon EF-S 15-85 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Lens

I have tried numerous lenses on various cameras in the past few years since I got in to photography.

I started out with the 450d with an 18-55mm and a 55-250mm lens. I upgraded the 18-55 to the 17-55 f/2.8 lens along with a 50d which I have since replaced with this 15-85mm which is now the only lens I use on my 60d.

I was looking for a lens that would stay on my camera most of the time and feel that the 15-85 is the perfect walkabout lens. Sure it is not as fast as the 17-55 but you do get the wider angle and a bit more zoom but at the cost of the variable aperture. I don't pixel peep like other people but in terms of picture quality I have not seen much difference between the two lenses. I also feel the 15-85 is a nicer size on the 60d as it is smaller and balances the camera better than the larger and heavier 17-55.

The 15-85 does have a bit of barrel distortion at the wide angle as per most lenses but this is not a problem to me as the Lightroom 3 lens profile fixes this. I find the 15 also wide enough for landscapes and city photography so that saved me from buying a proper wide angle like the canon 10-22mm and it was long enough for my requirements so could get rid of the 55-250mm.

The zoom is nice and smooth as is the full time manual focus so this is great to have to take some really nice video with the likes of the 550d, 7d and 60d.

The 15-85 has a metal mount so you will find this a nice upgrade from the kit lenses and generally the lens feels very solid. When the lens is pointed downwards you will not experience any lens creep unless you are around the 50/55mm. At 15 and 85mm it doesn't move.

I have had my lens for about 18 months and have used it fairly extensively and recently the silver band at the end of the lens has started to peel off. It is like the red band you see on the L lenses. I have spoken to the repair centre who said that it won't be a big deal to fix but it is a bit of a pain that it has happened. I have read on the forums that this has happened to other users so this is why I have knocked it down to 4 stars.

If you want a good sized walkabout lens I would say give this lens serious consideration but your lens choice will simply be down to the type of photography you do.

This is a cracking lens and is just about the only lens I used on my 450D and now my 7D. It is solid and dependable. It was great in combination with my 450D and is even better with the 7D.
It doesn't try to stretch too far 15-85 so performance is OK at both extremes and great in the middle. I have taken some fantastic
photos which I would never have been able to get if the thing wasn't so versatile as the opportunity would have been gone if I had needed to change lenses.
I don't know of a better lens for walk about than this - it really makes life easy and saves you fiddling with the technology rather than getting the pic composition reasonable. I have also used it for portrait work - works well and you can keep your distance from the poor unfortunate subject

The one drawback is the price :(

When we bought our 60D, we thought the 18-55 lens kit was a good deal - and it probably was. But we have been building our collection of lenses, and having supplemented the original lens, we decided that it was already time to replace it with something rather better.

This lens is in a different league, which frankly you would expect given the huge jump in price. It is big, solid, and rather heavy, but it fits on the the camera with a very satisfying clunk, and once there, it feels surprisingly well balanced and not at all unwieldy.

There is one area that this lens does to seem to suffer in according to the reviews I read, and that is vignetting. I had already ensured the camera had the data for this lens installed to allow the built-in peripheral illumination correction (IE: vignetting compensation) to work. If you have a camera that supports this and you have not investigated it, do it. The in-camera correction it does for JPGs is really very good. If you tend to shoot RAW, then you can probably get even better results post-camera in the DPP software. But the in-camera correction is still very good. Take a picture of an evenly lit blank wall without flash, with and without the option turned on, and you can see the results very clearly.

One feature of this lens that I particularly like is that you can operate the manual focus even when the lens is in autofocus mode, and when the camera is focussing, the focus ring does not turn, so you don't have to worry about how you are cradling the lens in your hand while shooting and obstructing its movement, or possibly even breaking it, as you might do with other lenses.

If you are buying this lens and also want a hood for it - don't pay a fortune for the Canon one. Look for JJC - it is less than a third of the price, and is very good quality - fits well and does not obscure any of the frame.

I have seen some reviews which say that there isn't much difference in quality between this and the 18-55. That aside for a moment, this lens does give a lot more at both ends of the scale - 15 is gratifyingly wide-angle, while 85 is a really very decent general purpose zoom. But on the quality front, for me there is no contest. This lens is streets ahead of our 18-55, which suffers quite bad chromatic aberration. Maybe it is faulty, I don't know. But I am very happy with this replacement. It's expensive, and when you look at the results, you can tell.