Question for DK regarding 450D...

[Raven Falls]

During the "little excitement" on That Other Board, you mentioned something along the lines of the Digital Rebel being a good camera but, to get the best out of it, you need expensive glass. Indeed, I've been noticing that, although the new IS kit lens is apparently not bad, reports on the matching IS 55-250mm indicate that it is lacking in sharpness, thus eliminating the selling point of a reasonably cheap 2-lens kit with coverage of 18-250mm.

In your opinion, if someone was interested in the 450D, what would be the minimal lens setup that would do it justice in that range (18-250 or beyond) if IS was important?

[David Kilpatrick]

Having used one, the new 18-55mm IS Canon is the ideal choice - it is better than the mark II non-IS. Other than that, it's difficult. You really don't want a 16-35mm f2.8 on a 450D; the 17-85 and most other older Canon lenses are not really all that wonderful. I find that almost any of the 70-300mm choices - even the generation 1 IS which we still have - can be surprisingly good. So I would go for an 18-55 plus 70-300mm on that body, short of something much better like the 70-200mm f4 L which was designed with digital more in mind. And of course the 10-22mm is a good choice.

Too few of Canon's lenses have been properly updated for digital. We had the 35mm f1.4, 85mm f1.2 and 70-200mm f4 to try with our 450D (our 'house' Canon remains a 400D). The 85mm f1.2 did not work wonders, and misfocused - really serious FF at portrait distances - though no sign of this was seen through the finder. The 35mm f1.4 was great, perfect focus and superb quality. I got some good results from the 85mm by knowing how to avoid the front focus but it was a real problem that straight AF screwed up.

They never sent me a standard lens with the 450D but I got the IS 18-55mm with the 1000D and it is clearly an extremely good lens. It produced better detail resolution than the Nikon D700 with 24-70mm f2.8, but you had better not mention that.

David