5/5 rating: We get what we pay for. But maybe a little more with this le, March 23, 2001 Reviewer: Hairong Shi from Iowa City,IA USA This lens is very good. Picture is very sharp with 100-200 mm. and it's perfect for head&body portrait. I love this lens. In 300 mm area you can see softness but it's not much.
And I compared with 28-105,this one is sharper at 100 than28-105 @105, and it shows much less distortion.
Compared with 75-300mm USM, this one seems sharper than 75-300, with the focus speed almost the same.
Of course, there are other better ones(like 70-200 f2.8L or other fixed focal telephoto lenses), but look what you pay for, it's really a good deal for amateur photographers.
We originally received this lens as a gift. We hike a lot, and the people who gave it to us knew that we liked to take pictures of wildlife. Previously, our only lens had been the fundamentally unsatisfactory 28-80 that came with our Canon Rebel G. After receiving this lens, we liked it so much that for some time we have been using it more often than the 28-80. Even though it is a telephoto zoom, the pictures seem sharper and the colors better. Presumably the optics in this more expensive lens are far superior to those in the 28-80.
We have used this lens under a variety of conditions, and never had a problem. We have taken it hiking, including on a trip to Yellowstone, and captured a lot of really wonderful pictures of wildlife, including owls perched in trees and shaded by leaves, lots of other birds, buffalo, elk, deer, and so forth. The lens turns out to be reasonably bright, so with the 300mm we have still been able to get decent pictures on cloudy days, as long as we use ASA 400 or better yet 800. We have also used this lens extensively at public events, including a graduation ceremony held in a tent. We were afraid the light would be insufficient, but with ASA 800 the pictures of the people at the speaker's podium still turned out great.
Although this lens doesn't seem to have been specifically intended as a Macro, we have also found it far superior to the 28-80 for close up shots of flowers, and so forth. It is actually able to focus to within only a few feet.
Unfortunately we can't compare this lens to any other telephoto zooms, since we don't have experience with them, but we can say that overall we are extremely happy with it. While we have begun replacing our 28-80 with a series of primes, we feel no need to buy any more telephoto lens for the time being.