Buying decisions: 70-200 4 IS or 2.8 non IS AND 17-40 or 10-22?

[LoneSierra]

I can't give you any advice on the 70-200 IS or non from experience, but at that point I'd probably go with the IS. I mean, if you want to leave the tripod at home, you're probably really going to want the IS, even though it's a little slower, but if IS corrects for 3 or 4 stops, that's going to be a bigger difference than the physical extra size of the aperture, since it's only a 1 or 2 stop bigger ap. size.


As far as the wide angle, I don't own one, but I've used it, and you can seriously get 5 feet of wall into a picture, when your 1.5 feet away from it. Obviously the distortion becomes present, but acceptable for that crazy 10mm angle. When zoomed in to 22mm the distortion is all but invisible, they did an incredible job on this "non L" lens. It's going to be my next lens, actually. You can't ever seem to get far enough away inside, especially for weddings, and even zoomed in at 22mm it's still wide, and the distortion is all but non existant.


You can fix a little bit of it in photoshop too, so the lens is extremely useable through the whole focal range.


Hope that helped a little!

[Keith B]

While IS may not stop things in motion, it allows you to shoot at slower shutter speeds that will still freeze relatively slow moving objects in sStreet portraits but would normally blur due to hand shake.


Rule of thumb is you shutter speed should be 1/(focal length)to avoid hand shake blurring. So at 200mm you would need at least 1/200. With IS you could probably shoot at 1/60(?) and still freeze your subject pretty well and not experience blurring from hand shake.


I owned the 70-200 4.0 non IS and I hardly used it. At that focal length w/o IS. I couldn't find too many uses for unless it was studio portrait with strobe lighting or outdoor sports on bright days. So I sold that with in a year of purchase.


So for discretion and value I'd say 4.0 IS.