A serious lens for serious photographers!

This lens is a major purchase, as the typical retail price is $1,400. However, if you are keen on sports or wildlife photography the price is fully justified.

The image quality is superb, very sharp, great colours. I first used this lens to photograph a rugby game, and the players were astounded by the quality of the images the lens produced. I've had the lens for nearly five years now and it's probably my most used lens, due to its quality and range.

The autofocusing is very fast, and as it’s a USM (ultra sonic motor) lens, it’s also very quiet.

The lens also has Canon’s IS (image stabilising) technology. This enables you to successfully handhold a lens approximately 2 stops slower than normal.

(The normal rule of thumb is that the slowest shutter speed you can handhold is the reciprocal of the focal length, so at 250mm, the slowest speed you can handhold is 1/250 sec. IS allows you to handhold as slow as 1/60 sec at 250mm)

Canon’s cheaper IS lenses have just two settings: on or off. This has three settings; off, normal and a panning setting that you use when you want the benefit of IS, but also want to pan to track a moving object. This means that you can pan at low shutter speed to get the background nicely blurred, but still have the main subject very sharp.

It’s a very well built lens. Many cheaper lenses have a plastic barrel, not this one. It has a metal barrel. As a result, it’s a big heavy lens, weighing approx 1.4kg (3lb) To get the best out of it; you’ll often need to use a monopod or tripod, not to avoid camera shake, just because the camera and lens combination is so heavy. Fortunately, the lens comes with a tripod mount, which means you can fasten the lens, rather than the camera to the tripod for better balance and also to quickly switch from landscape to portrait format.

To sum up, this lens just oozes quality.