Great Lens for the Money

This lens is about the best you can do for the money without resorting to the heavy special glass professional lenses. It's bulky, but the Image Stabilization (IS) dramatically reduces blurryness due to shaking. It's worth lugging the extra weight of the IS electronics for the gain in sharpness you have.

You can take hand held pictures at full zoom with little or no blurring. These IS lenses are real battery drainers, so make sure you have backup batteries with you at all times (especially under extremely high altitude conditions).

At 75 mm, you can use this as an all purpose trip lens (albeit a little slow). At 300 mm, the colors appear to "darken" a bit in some pictures.