This lens is somewhat of a mixed bag. Optically, it's a great step up from the kit lens, and a reasonable compromise on price vs. performance. The image stabilisation is great, if not quite as great as the marketing material might suggest.

I have used this lens which came with my camera for 10 years. It has had little use and was well looked after. Provided good results. The zoom was a bit of a problem when looking up or down as it would start to slide, so has to be held to avoid booking in or out. Until it goes wrong!.....

In my condition of amateur, i use to buy second hand items to try to save some money, and in most cases those items work very good. But in this case, this lens has a focus problem that doesn't permit to work fine. Nevertheless the lens is very good

The lens is often considered as an upgrade path from the basic EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS kit zoom. Obviously it adds quite a bit of range, a 2nd generation image stabilizer and a ring-type USM drive with full-time manual focusing.

The first step up Canon's ladder of standard zoom lenses, at least from the kit lens supplied with the 550D and 600D, is the EF-S 17-85mm. It's better built, with a much sturdier feel than the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS kit lens for those cameras.

Used this lens for several years, replaced it with Tamron 18-270, not as sharp. During my time with the 17-85, I enjoyed its sharpness and light weight. However, midway through, it lost its autofocus and I had to have a repair by Canon, not cheap.

I encountered a problem which I later found was a very common one for this lens - the zoom gets stuck. This is due to a tiny screw that comes loose deep in the heart of it. There is an excellent YouTube video setting out how to take it apart (removing about 22 screws!) and fix it.

Lightweight

Lens Creep

I got one of these as my first step up from the kit lens on my Rebel XTi, the 17-55 kit lens. It gave me about half of what I wanted but overall I was disappointed. It did not help that I came into this owning an S2 and an FZ5.

it's a nice range; plus with IS it's much more useful than the kit lens; and not too much more expensive

it's even slower than the kit lens focus isn't that great in low light

I do like this lens but when my camera started to show an error message with only this lens, I took it to a repair shop. They had to replace a part and said it was a common problem for this lens ...and it cost me approx $200 for the out of warrantee timeframe repair.

I have had this lens for around 4 years now & have taken at least 8,000 photos with it. Compact, fairly light weight, & easy to use makes it an ideal walk around lens for shooting close to medium range subjects.

Easy to use; Compact