It’s 5am in the morning and it sounds like the heavens just opened up outside, I’ve been up since 3:45 to drop the cats off at the airport so they can speed off to Sydney.  It seems like an ideal time for an entry.

I’ve had my Canon 40D for almost a month now and am really happy with the performance of the camera, since my Nikon D50 was stolen a year ago I’ve held off buying a new DSLR for various reasons and opted for a very capable G9 ( with added grip and wide angle lens ).  I was really pleased with the features and support of the G9 and since I was starting with a clean slate ( I sold the remaining Nikon lenses ) I decided to move into the Canon camp this time around.  Canon has a great range of DSLR’s, I was initially looking at the Digital Rebel series but felt I wanted to invest in something slightly more advanced, the 50D is one of the more recent introductions in the Canon line and although it’s a capable camera I opted for the older but revered 40D.

With the body came the Canon 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM lens which was purchased as a temporary lens until I had sufficient funds to buy one of the sharper/faster ones available.  I chose the lens as a replacement for the 17-70mm f2.8-4  Sigma that I used with the D50 and carried around the world with me for  a year – I was extremely happy with the range and quality of the photos it produced.  There were quite a few positive reviews for the Canon lens with many of them touting the virtues of the image stablization. My first few snaps, albeit on a bright sunny day, were nicely rendered with decent sharpness and contrast but as I spend more time with it my joy is deminisioning.  Whether or not the optics are as good or better than the Sigma I’ve come to the conclusion that any sort of IS system is a crutch for slow lenses and really shouldn’t be relyed upon, and any reviewer that states “with the IS you’re effectively given 2 extra stops of latitude to shoot with” is misleading.

The main problem with IS is the assumption that your subject isn’t moving.  My Sigma was a few stops quicker all the time, not just when everything but me was still. This isn’t to say there’s no place for IS, it would be imperitive with a long fast lens – it just seems a waste on a 17-85mm zoom.

Luckily I’ll be with arms reach of Discount Digital Photographics in less than a week!