• Decent build quality - much better than any of Canon's 18-55mm kit lenses
• Very useful focal length range, almost ideal for a walkaround lens
• Highly effective image stabilisation
• Excellent autofocus and manual override
• Consistently high image quality across almost all of the range

• Poor performance at wideangle, with marked barrel disortion, high levels of light falloff, and intense green/magenta chromatic aberration
• Slow maximum aperture
• Very average close-up performance

Overall conclusion

The EF-S 17-85mm is a major step up from Canon’s EF-S 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 II kit lens, adding an extended focal length range, image stabilisation, fast and silent autofocus with a decent manual focus option, and substantially improved build quality. This makes it, at first sight at least, an ideal all-in-one ‘walkaround’ lens for Canon’s APS-C SLRs, which will cover the majority of photographic opportunities when travelling light.

And to a great extent it delivers on this potential, with good imaging performance over much of its range, especially in that extended telephoto region, plus effective image stabilisation which works as promised. But there’s no getting away from this lens’s Achilles’ Heel, which is comparatively poor optical performance at the wideangle end. Most intrusive is the green/magenta chromatic aberration at 17mm, which is highly visible in a wide variety of shooting situations. Now if you’re only planning on viewing files on screen or making small prints, this may not be a huge problem, but if you are making large prints or viewing at 100% it’s a clear issue. However it can be effectively overcome if you are prepared to shoot in RAW and eliminate the CA in post-processing, using either Canon's Digital Photo Pro (v3.4 or later) or third party software such as Photoshop.

The lens also exhibits significant barrel distortion at 17mm, making it far from ideal for photographing architecture, except perhaps Gaudi in Barcelona, or City Hall amd the ‘Gherkin’ in London. And with its relatively slow maximum aperture, this is also not an ideal lens for low light/indoor photography of people or other moving subjects. It’s important to appreciate that while image stabilisation will allow hand-holding at slower shutter speeds than usual without suffering image degradation due to camera shake, those shutter speeds are still slow, and moving subjects will therefore still be blurred. Likewise the slow maximum aperture will limit flash range, so for this kind of photography, a faster zoom or prime lens will be a better option.

So overall the judgement to be made is whether the attractive feature set of this lens offsets the negatives, and most importantly the problems with distortion and chromatic aberration at wide angle. If you shoot primarily towards the telephoto end, this lens will reward you with excellent results, but if your interests tend more towards the wideangle end of the spectrum and you don't want to shoot RAW, then it may well be a good idea to look away now. However overall it must be said this lens is really rather enjoyable to use; the zoom range is very flexible, the autofocus fast and silent, and the image stabilizer highly effective. So in balance its advantages probably outweigh its disadvantages, and despite its faults this lens is ultimately still one of our favourites for Canon's APS-C dSLRs. Therefore, as long as its limitations are appreciated, it just about earns our recommendation.

GOOD FOR:
Walkaround lens for outdoor shooting and travel use.

NOT SO GOOD FOR:
Indoor available light or flash shooting.
Architectual photography where distortion would be a problem.

Recommended (with reservations)

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Samples Gallery

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Canon 17-85mm EF Samples Gallery - Posted 28th January 2008