Does sporting a red ring around your lens make your heart and ego swell with pride?
Does the sight of a red ring on someone else's lens make you green with envy?
Start studying!
There are marvelous lenses out there for the finding!
When the Canon ef-s 55-250 lens first came out I was very surprised by the excellent quality of the images, but I wanted for the lens to prove itself first, and it really has. A rating of 8.9 on Fred Miranda's Lens Forum is nothing to sneeze at.
I still didn't need it, but a member of my Digipets Yahoo group posted some pictures she had taken with it and they were way better than what I'd been seeing. It was obvious that her Photoshop skills tweaked the images to perfection.
So...still determined not to give in to yet another lens, I took a peek at the specifications on the B & H website. Ah....it weighed so little! How nice, I thought, it would be to have a lens with a little bit more reach than my 70-200 f/4L and one that would fit entirely into my favored Adorama Slinger case...and one that weighed 12.8 ounces less. My shoulder was excited about less drag on it.
The lens arrived yesterday and although it lacks usm (you can't focus manually while you are in autofocus mode, but must move the switch on the lens to mf) and the focusing sounds more Volkswagen than BMW, the image quality makes it a winner in my book...and I shouldn't forget the fact that is has image stabilization, which the 700-200 f/4L lacks.