I was very disappointed with this lens. It has a very cheap feel and the image quality was terrible. I was only able to test it with my Canon 20d and not with film. I couldn't believe how lousy it was, I had read some other reviews and they seemed positive. I tried it on a tripod and shot a variety of things text and 3-D objects and never could pull a sharp photo. I noticed that I had to use a lot more unsharp mask than normal to be useable. I tend to use primes a lot and so maybe I expected to much.

This lens is very cheap as lenses go. I didn't realize it when I bought my Canon EOS 10D a couple years ago. I have had one complaint with this lens since I got it: not very sharp. Not having a lot of SLR experience I wasn't sure if the problem was the lens or the digital camera. Or was it the alorithms in the camera for convering the image to JPG? After all, sharpness is just one of the parameters you can set in the camera. So what I ended up doing was bumping the sharpness in the camera all the way up to get the kind of sharpness in the image I was looking for.

What I am talking about is, say, the edges around your subject's face are not sharp, or your daughter's freckles aren't quite crisp enough, etc.

So I tried a friend's L series Canon lens and got exactly what I was looking for: crisp, sharp, more like my eyes saw the image as I was taking the picture. So, in short, a really good lens that takes really sharp pictures costs a lot of money, 3 or 4 times what this lens costs. Sadly, I already bought one L series lens and it is so amazing I am now forced to buy another one.

But, I just wanted to write this review in case you were wondering why your otherwise awesome looking pictures are just not as sharp as you might have expected. This lens is great in all other aspects, and as I am realizing now, nice and light weight. But if you're obsessive like I apparently am, you might want to fork out more money for a better quality lens.

UPDATE: 29.Mar.2005 (see original review below)

After shooting this lens for several months, I started realizing that I was getting some pretty ugly color shift. Gradually, I became more and more unhappy with it, to the point that I rarely use it anymore. Unfortunately, I can't afford to replace it, so it remains my only lens in the normal zoom range. It's not a bad lens, but it's not nearly the lens I thought it was when I first got it. If you shoot landscapes with it, you're going to be faced with finding a way to fix the color. For every day use, I suppose it's fine.
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After shooting Canon's 28-105mm on my Canon A2e for five years, I had to replace it with a similar length lens equivalent for my new Canon 10D. The 24-85mm comes out to be a little longer on the short end, as well as on the long end (38.4-136mm "35mm equivalent"). At twice the price of the 28-105, I can only say that you are getting twice the lens, and it's great. you will pay more for 67mm filters for this lens (as opposed to 58mm for most of Canon's consumer lenses), but it's all worth it!

This is a fantastic lens made from fantastic glass. It's a joy to shoot, and it's a great match to the smaller 22.66mm sensor of the lower-end pro digital bodies. It's worth every dime of the price.

This lens is almost superb for its price! It's a middle-class lens, what appears in the following:

- it has bigger light-factor (3.5-4.0 vs 4.0-5.6 in the low-class lenses). This gives you more possibilities, for instance to use faster shutter speeds or to decrease the depth-of-fild for special effects)

- the first (outer) lens doesn't spin what gives you an opportunity to use square filters; using a poliriser becomes as easy as any other filter.

- the USM (Ultra Sonic Motor) gives you a really super speed of focusing and completely silent engine. You'll catch the fastest actions and nothing will distrub your object!

These are the most important and useful features of the lens. I should also admit, that the focal distance of this lens is almost ideal for everyday photography, because gives you an opportunity to shoot from landscapes (~24-50mm) to portraiture (~50-85mm) with an equal simplicity and quality.

I've had this lens for a few years now, and I absolutely love it. It is compact, sharp, and dependable. I'm a wide-angle shooter, so this one is just about perfect. Canon's USM is beautiful. Unlike Nikon, Canon seeks and achieves quiet, fast, and accurate auto focusing. Coupled with a light and quiet EOS camera body, and you've got an excellent documentary kit, great for shooting people in close and personal. At 24 mm, this lens gives excellent range for close work, with lots of depth and sharpness, making focusing and composing a cinch in evolving situations. My only gripe with this lens is its manual focus ring. I grew up with manual focus, and I love excercising that skill, but this lens has nothing more than an obligatory, plastic, and poorly placed focusing ring that discourages manual work. Fortunately, Canon's autofocusing system is phenomenal. Round-out your EOS kit with a Canon SpeedLite (compatible all the way down to 24 mm).

CANON EF 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 USM ZOON Lens is ease of use, powerful, and lightweight(380g) lens. With silent and high speed autofocusing. The lens will let your pictures have great sharp, high resolution images.

It is a very great lens-excellent quality and reasonable price. You can replace it with the standard lens. The first choose for Canon user's owner-MUST have one.