When I bought my camera (Canon EOS 500D) I got it as a kit, body, 18 - 50 and 50 - 210 lenses. As the lenses were Canon they performed very well and I was happy with them, just not the constant swapping and the larger bag required to transport them.
So I bought myself the above. I've been using it for some months now and thought I'd write a small review to let you know what I thought.
Here's an 'official' review of the lens follow this link to see Digital Photography's review of the lens.
Pros - It does exactly what I wanted it to do; I have only one lens that covers most shots I want to take. It fits into a small-ish shoulder bag with room for a few filters and a spare battery. It feels well constructed and weighty, on a horizontal plane it focus relatively quickly in good light. The shots it takes are clear and have little distortion around the edges...even at the extreme end. This is a strange point....it looks like a decent lens...the Canon lenses didn't, they looked like everybody else's lenses and had this narrow end 52mm diameter or something. This is a chunky beast with a 72mm filter diameter, it looks the business....this shouldn't matter...but it does...a bit. A feauture I like is the lens 'lock' you can see it on the picture above, this stops the lens from moving at all (i.e. the zoom sliding)
Cons - first thing you notice...compared to the Canon lenses that came as part of the kit....it's heavy...there are a lot of lenses in this monster, to do what it does takes a lot of technology and a lot of glass, a few hours of carrying this about on your shoulder and you feel it.
The double 'trombone' mechanism that makes this lens almost double in length at the extreme 270 end, is somewhat sticky in the middle, the transition point (around 120) is not smooth and feels awkward, almost like it doesn't want to go, you have to force it a bit.
Because of it's weight, it suffers badly from 'creep' i.e, if you're not holding the barrel and the 'lock' isn't on...it slides under it's own weight; whether it's point upwards or downwards.
Like I said above...on the horizontal it performs fine, but if you tilt this lens up or down slightly....it doesn't perform as well, maybe due to that lens creep I was talking about. If you switch to manual focus...then fine...but you've bought a AF lens...you expect it to AF! It really struggles getting a lock on things when away from the horizontal, especially the further you move away from the 18 end of the zoom.
The 72mm filter size....looks cool...costs a bomb to buy filters. I bought a polariser for it in KL, and even a cheap one was $80.
Overall...I'm very happy with it, this is an excellent lens that performs well under most conditions and for this price...it really can't be beaten...there is no other lens on the market that has this zoom range!!. There are certainly better lenses, but not at this price range, and not with this zoom range. So if you're a traveller like me, and want one lens that does most jobs...this is it!
