Best walk-around zoom for Canon

I bought this lens to replace the 28-80mm zoom that came with my Elan IIE. I'm not going to list statistics for the lens; I'm just going to describe my subjective experience with it.

I chose this lens only after HUGE amounts of research. I talked to many people who owned the lens, and they all thought it was wonderful. I agree. It's sharp, reasonably fast and solidly built.

The Image Stabilization performs *better* than advertised, taking clear hand-held pictures with shutter speeds as long as 1/8th of a second. I've even had pictures turn out with shutter speeds of 1/2 second. This lets you take pictures in dim situations without using flash, and allows you to use smaller apertures for increased depth-of-field.

Just a couple of annoying aspects to be aware of, but nothing to stop you from buying this lens. The lens hood is great--but when reversed for storage, you can't turn the zoom ring. The 72mm filter size is wider than most lenses, so you'll spend a few extra dollars buying filters.