JraPA86,


A few questions: What do you typically shoot? What do you want to shoot? Do you just want to replace your general purpose lens or are you trying to cover ~18 mm to 200 mm with your $1,500 budget? For a quick example, if you want to shoot pictures around your house of kids, which move, the EFS 17-55 makes sense. If you want to take portraits/macro, you may want to think about a prime lens or two. If you want to take pictures of birds, the 100-400L. If you want absolutely the best IQ, you may want to look at some prime lenses. The more you tell us about what you want to shoot, the more we can help. But going with the focal range you mention and assuming you are shooting "normal" things, you may want to consider either the EFS 17-55 or the EFS 15-85 plus one of the 70-200 f4 L lenses (non-IS $625 or the IS, which has better IQ, $1,120). I could see covering from ~18 mm to ~200 mm range with a combination of two of those lenses really well.


And, you may already know this, but when buying lenses, you may also want to factor in the cost of UV filters, circular polarizer filters, etc, which can be expensive themselves. I am finding that many of the "cool" pictures that I like a lot where shot with the aide of a filter.