Largely a waste of money

quadrox wrote:

J A C S wrote:

quadrox wrote:

So I cannot recommend this lens to anyone unless you really really need the f 2.8.

… which is the whole point...

Duh...?!

Of course one buys a faster lens to get a faster lens. What I am saying is, that in this case a faster lens doesn't get you what you would usually expect from a faster lens.

I'm an extreme pixel peeper, and I shot with both this lens and the 18-55 in various conditions, and I could not for the life of me detect a difference in the image quality.

How is your 18-55 at 55/2.8?

And I never felt limited by the kit zoom in any way. I even once forgot to put the 17-55 in my bag, but still had the kit zoom. I was quite anxious about it actually, but at the end of the day I hadn't missed the 17-55 one bit and the images were fine.

This is OK. Most people are not limited by their phones either.

So yes, that f 2.8 is going to allow you to keep shooting in slightly darker conditions if you are going to shoot wide open, that is undeniable, but it's not much of a difference really.

Yep, just two stops at, say, 55mm. Like the difference between 200/4 and 200/2. Or 40/1.4 vs. the pancake 40/2.8.

And at the long end you get a (tiny) bit of background separation wide open. But if you expect really improved image quality, handling, build quality, or anything else for that money, your'e going to be extremely disappointed.

You get improved IQ vs. something the kit cannot even do.

Those kit lenses are sharp, indeed but they are very very slow. It is not a big achievement to have sharp f/5.6-f/9 eq. lens. What more do you expect there? It is an achievement to get more light.

I owned those lenses, BTW. The kit lenses I owned had low contrast compared to the 17-55. It was very obvious.