A while back I bought a Canon 55-200 II for the pretty rare occasions I want tele. I bought it largely on Adam-T's recommendation. I've had it for a couple of months now, and while it's certainly turned out to be an occasional-use lens (I've only used it extremely occasionally), I have shot enough with it to know pretty much what it can do and under which circumstances.

I tend to concur with Adam-T that it is probably "the" cheap-o lightweight medium telezoom to beat at this time. It's highly dependable and has no fatal flaws that I've come across: while it doesn't really make you go ooh or aah about anything, the trade-offs are pretty nicely balanced against each other. It's remarkably consistent in performance from end to end and at any focus distance, perfectly usable wide-open, focus is acceptably fast and bang-on accurate at all focal lengths, it's almost remarkably sharp edge to edge, and bokeh is at least fair -- the chromatic weirdness that you often get on cheap telezooms is very much kept under control.

On the downside, it's pretty lacking in contrast (shadows usually come out looking rather washed out and the images look rather "flat" out of the camera, although a bit of post-processing puts zing into them quite nicely), and of course the extremely cheap build makes it something less than an unadulterated joy to shoot with. Moreover, the focal length changes dramatically depending on focus distance -- at maximum tele, image size changes by (at a rough estimate) 30 per cent or more when going from minimum to maximum focus distance.

Bottom line: it's a cheap workhorse lens. Meaning, you know pretty much exactly what you're going to get whenever you release the shutter: a picture that's sharp, well focused, with no obvious flaws, but with nothing to shout about (optically) either. Just how low-end zooms should be.

So, if you want a telezoom to keep with you "just in case," just want to dip your toe into telephoto shooting, or are on a pretty tight budget, you could do a lot worse than this one. But if you're seriously into sports or some similar medium tele application, an L it isn't. But it's certainly a much better balanced package than Canon's previous cheap-o tele, the 90-300/4.5-5.6 USM. How it compares to the Sigma 55-200 I don't know, not having tried it; going by photos I've seen, though, it looks like the Sigma could be a hair contrastier but a hair softer, and going by what I've heard, it's probably a fair bit slower to focus. Nicer build, though.

Here are a few samples. All converted from RAW with RawShooter Essentials at default settings; full frames downsampled and sharpened, crops direct from RSE. Otherwise no post-processing.

Sample shot 1 -- medium distance, stopped down to f/11.

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/sample1-f11.jpg

Center:

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/center1.jpg

Corner:

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/corner1.jpg

Sample shot 2: near-infinity, f/5.6:


http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/sample2-f5.6.jpg

Center:

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/center2.jpg

Corner:

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/corner2.jpg

Bokeh:

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/bokeh.jpg

Zoom range:

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/range-55.jpg

http://www.seittipaja.fi/misc/55-200/range-200.jpg

/Petteri
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