Canon 18-200mm IS Lens Review: Forget About It!

Canon EF-S 18-200mm F3.5-5.6 IS  Lens

If you’re a serious photographer with very little tolerance for mediocrity, you’re going to pass for the new Canon EF-S 18-200mm F3.5-5.6 IS all-around zoom lens.

It’s convenient for walking about, like when you don’t want to tote around too many huge lenses. Travelling, for instance, and taking casual pictures at the same time. But for quality images, you still have to carry along your trusty wide angle lens and your good old telephoto zoom lens.

The Canon EF-S 18-200mm F3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens, according to a review by DPReview.com, delivers poor sharpness across much of the frame at 18mm and wider apertures. There’s also pronounced barrel distortion at wide angle and pincushion distortion around 50mm. Chromatic aberration? That too, high levels of it at either end of the zoom range.

It’s very well-built, of course, as is expected of Canon lenses, and the IS is really excellent, giving you 3-4 stops leeway for taking that difficult shot in low-light or shaky conditions, but we’re talking image quality here and this new $700 Canon lens does not deliver an impeccable image.

[Via: DPReview.com]

Published by Chris Malinao

Chris teaches Lightroom as workflow software to photography students at the FPPF, Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation. He also teaches smartphone photography.