SLRgear recently reviewed the new Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens for the Canon EOS SLR camera line.

They are extremely impressed by the quality of the lens wide open, which is something you wouldn’t expect from a $200 lens:

However they’ve done it, the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS shows excellent sharpness at 18mm wide-open at f/3.5, a focal length/aperture combination which typically shows off the weakness of most consumer-grade lenses. Image sharpness is essentially even across the frame, and doesn’t exceed 2 units on our scale of 1-12. For a lens of this price point, this is amazing performance.

They found the best image quality at f/5.6 and a focal length of 35mm. Diffraction was first seen at f/16, but image quality stayed good until the really small apertures (e.g., f/29.) They write that “at that point, the image is quite soft, but at least the softness is uniform at between 4 and 5 units. All in all, excellent performance.” Sounds good to me!

They also report that chromatic aberration is “remarkably reduced” over the previous non-IS version of the 18-55mm (which was a common kit lens, for example with the Canon Digital Rebel XT.) On the other hand, vignetting is just very slightly worse on this lens than on the older one, although they take pains to point out that it’s a very minor and practically negligible difference.

Distortion is about 1% at the worst, and looks best around 40mm. They point out that the distortion changes very linearly with focal length, something that you didn’t see with the older version of the lens.

Focusing speed and performance are both reported as being good:

Autofocus performance is fast and quiet, with the whole lens racking through its focus in just under one second. While focus performance is going to depend alot on the body the lens is mounted to, on the digital Rebel Xti I sampled the lens with, I didn’t have a single problem with focus, and focusing between points was lightning quick.

The build is pretty much the same as the old 18-55mm lens, light and plastic. They don’t try to measure what you get from its image stabilization, but state that they wouldn’t be surprised if it lived up to Canon’s claims of four stops of exposure improvement.

I’m not sure that image stabilization makes too much sense on this lens, but I suppose it can’t hurt, especially when it’s not that much more than the non-IS version (roughly $200 versus roughly $150.) Although my beloved 50mm f/1.8 without any IS is still going to be much better in low light at that focal length, since even 4 stops of improvement isn’t going to make up for that f/5.6 largest aperture at 55mm on this one.

Be sure to read the whole review for more details, and sample pictures and performance graphs.