Any suggestions on decent zoom lenses for EF / EF-S format? Within £150 price range and also portrait lenses other than the 50 1.8 / 1.4 I don't quite understand the whole MM thing, I've tried, but it seems the 55-250mm has the same range as 400mm - that's what i don't understand..
Just to pick up on the 250mm / 400mm thing..
In the film days each negative was 35mm wide.
Initially to make a sensor for a digital camera that big was impossible, then as technology advanced it became possible, but flipping expensive.
The answer was to make sensors that are smaller.. the trade off is that overall image quality is not as good.
DSLRs that have a 35mm sensor are known as "full frame".
Cameras with a smaller sensor are known as "crop cameras"
Nicked from wikipedia maybe this will help:
You'll notice that the Canon APS-C cameras (like yours) have a crop factor of 1.6..
The size of the sensor affects the field of view - probably best to read this :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_factor
So if we take the 250, times it by the crop factor (1.6), we end up with... 400mm. This basically means that a 250mm lens on a 1.6 crop factor camera has the same field of view as a 400mm lens on a full frame camera.
hope that helps ?