I bought this after reading this review...
http://www.ephotozine.com …estdetail.cfm?test_id=411
... as I needed a cheap telezoom for my forthcoming holiday. In the review it stated 'Amazing optical quality for a budget lens' so it sounded great. Would mine be the same?
I ordered it from Warehouseexpress for just £99, and I placed the order at 1:56pm Tuesday, and the lens arrived 10:00 the next morning. Good service!
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Simple enough: box, lens and hood. The lens diameter is only 52mm! The lens feels quite nice for a budget model, obviously quite plastic, but it feels tactile and solid enough. The zoom ring is fairly free, and although the focus ring is small, it is also quite smooth (quite a bit better than the 18-55 focus ring). Also, the focus ring is not directly connected to the end as in the 18-55mm. The lens extends quite a lot when zoomed to 200mm, but at the 55mm position, it's nice and compact.
It does make a bit of noise while focussing, but it's fairly quick (not USM quick but not too slow), but it seems pretty accurate.
So I went off and took some pictures. This picture was taken wide open (ie f/5.6) at 200mm indoors:
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No PP has been done, this is straight out of the camera. Here's a 100% crop for those interested:
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Now I think that's pretty impressive. That's handheld, indoors, at 200mm, wide open (f/5.6). Plus, the variable aperture doesn't seem to change from f/4 until quite late on.
Here's another picture taken, this time at around 65mm outdoors (again wide open - f/4 this time):
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Overall, I'm VERY happy with this lens, especially for the price. And both the pictures above were wide open, and sharpness obviously increases as you stop down a bit. I had never thought a telezoom of this price would be useable wide open, so I'm plesantly surprised.
on XT it didn't impress me at all!
