Canon 17-85mm F4-5.6 ?

It's a good lens - is the standard kit lens on 40 / 50D. There are other lenses about, depending on what focal length your after - 18-200mm for example. There are also faster lenses available F2.8's, but they tend to be more expensive.
 
I have one of these on my 40D and as an all round use it every day lens it's great.

It has a good range (28-135 eq) and the IS and focusing are very good. Also has full time manual focus which is useful

Down sides are the F4-5.6 but then it has the IS to help you out, and it not brilliant at the wide end, gets better as you go longer. But overall a good all round compromise.

The only real problem I had was early on trusting the camera to autofocus at 17mm in poor light, it would say it had locked on but about half the time it hadn't, this I think was is the reason for some many "is my 17-85 fuzzy" post on the internet.

What I do now is zoom in a bit, focus and zoom out again (you do need to back button focus to do this though).

A hood is quite useful, but don't buy a Canon one, get a cheap one from ebay or Cameraworld.

HTH

David
 
Had this discussion with a friend and told him that the 17-85mm isn't a great lens, although centrally it sharp through the range, it suffers from problems at the edges and at both extreme's (17mm and 85mm), best images at about 70mm. The range is great as a walkabout lens, but its performance lets it down. This lens really isn't much better than the 18-55mm kit lens, personally for similar money I would go for the tamron 17-50mm f2.8, its around the £300 mark and is a much better lens that the 17-85mm.
 
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