Lens review

Canon EF-S 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 II

1. Introduction

Originally posted 2006-02-06 on Optyczne.pl

Almost every owner of the Canon 300D, 350D or even 20D has already met one of the cheapest lens on the market – the Canon EF-S 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6.

Canon’s designers came to the conclusion that if you want the camera and lens set combination to be affordable; you need to economize on the lens. So they designed a very cheap plastic model, which is somewhat of a free of charge addition to their DLSR digital cameras. Ok, maybe we exaggerate a bit by saying “free of charge”, but not by much since the difference between buying the camera itself and the camera and the EF-S 18-55 mm lens combination was only 90$.

This tactic appeared to be right and definitely worth duplicating, as it’s been done by Canon’s biggest competitor - Nikon. The Nikon D70 and D70s were equipped with a pretty solid 17-70 mm lens but the D50 model was equipped with a bare bones lens with the same parameters as Canon’s plastic lens.

Is this cheap Canon lens really as bad as they say? We decided to check it out.