What’s a good general-purpose upgrade from the Canon 18-55mm kit lens?

Question

I’m using a Canon APS-C camera with the 18-55mm kit lens and want to upgrade to a better everyday lens. I know there’s no single “best” choice because budget and shooting style matter, but what are the strongest general-purpose upgrade options, and what are the trade-offs between them?

canon lenses upgrade aps-c standard-zoom

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

15y ago

user378 · Answer

If you only want to carry one lens,

and want your new lens to have at least the same capabilities as your kit lens, you have two basic options: a fast zoom, or a superzoom.

Fast zoom

This would cover a very similar focal length range as your kit lens; generally 17-50mm or 17-55mm, but have a constant aperture of f/2.8. Not a big deal at the wide end, but that's two stops (4 times) faster than your kit lens all the way zoomed in. This would let you take pictures in lower light without extra noise, and can have shallow depth of field. Some examples:

Canon 17-55mm f/2.8
Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4
Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 and Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 VC, which has image stabilization
Tokina 16-50mm f/2.8

Super zoom

A superzoom is a lens with a very long zoom range, covering both wide angle and telephoto. Your kit lens has about a 3x zoom; superzooms have 10x-15x. Generally, these aren't any faster than kit zooms, with a typical aperture range of f/3.5-f/5.6. These let you change composition without changing lenses, but won't generally win any awards for sharpness, low light abilities, or distortion.

If you're willing to carry more than one lens,

you can get more of a specialty lens, that solves one problem very well, instead of the very general-purpose lenses above. You've got 3 basic options for this: a wide zoom, telephoto zoom, or a fast prime.

Wide zoom

A wide zoom will let you get a much wider angle than the 18mm widest setting on your current lens, such as 10mm or 12mm. Some of these will be fisheye lenses, which produce severe distortion; others will be rectilinear, which means they produce a "normal" image, where straight lines in the world are straight in the image. Some fisheye lenses can provide a 180° (or more) field of view. Wide angle lenses often suffer from noticeable distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting, but this is usually better with a moderately stopped-down aperture and at the less-wide end of the zoom.

Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5
Canon 8-15mm f/4 Fisheye
Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6
Sigma 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 (Rectilinear, amazingly.)
Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 and Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 II
Tamron 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8

Telephoto zoom

A telephoto zoom would have a "wide" angle of somewhere around 55-75mm, and a long end of 200mm or more. Telephoto zooms can be sharper, less distorted, cheaper, and have faster autofocus than a superzoom with the same reach, but you have to switch back to your kit lens if you want to zoom out far enough. You can also get telephoto lenses with faster apertures, like f/4 or f/2.8, but these can get pretty expensive.

Apparently, Sigma also makes a 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 lens, which I guess would be a telephoto superzoom.

Fast prime

Fast primes are the kings of low-light photography. These generally have apertures of f/1.4 to f/2.0, though there are some f/1.2 and faster lenses out there. A basic fast prime like a 35mm or 50mm is a great second lens to get; they can be pretty affordable, and can be 8-16x faster than your kit lens at its telephoto end. Because they don't zoom, these can be incredibly sharp, have low chromatic aberration, and have very low distortion. The very wide aperture can create a very shallow depth of field, leaving everything but your subject out of focus.

Note: This isn't an exhaustive list of lenses; I tried to give a representative sample of the lenses you might look at in each category, but I left out many lenses. Also, I shoot Nikon, so I can't personally recommend any of these lenses. I suggest you research each lens you're considering.