Lens: Canon EF 28-135mm IS USM – is this all you need?

The first consumer lens Canon released with image stabilisation the EF 28-135mm IS USM has a lot going for it. If 28mm is wide enough, this could be all you need for a general purpose do-it-all lens for digital and analog film.

I started this review with a bias against this lens. I didn’t particularly like it when I first used tried it out. Now after taking a second look, I’ve changed my mind…

I acquired this EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM in mid 2019 after reading reviews on the interwebs that were mostly positive, but with occasional comments saying “… but there are better lenses”. It appears to be a lens that some liked and some didn’t.

This was the newest lens I’d bought and my expectations were high, but my first results were pretty disappointing: all I saw was soft corners and nothing that made me go WOW. So I put the lens away with plans to sell it or use it as a lender when I go photographing with other people. (Neither have happened yet.)

This was the newest lens I’d bought and my expectations were high, but my first results were pretty disappointing: all I saw was soft corners and nothing that made me go WOW. So I put the lens away with plans to sell it or use it as a lender when I go photographing with other people. (Neither have happened yet.)

Then for giggles in early 2020 I bought an ancient EF 35-135 f3.5-4.5 slide zoom from 1988, one of the earliest lenses Canon made for the EOS system. Through this lens I re-discovered the joys of the 135mm focal length. (I’d owned a Zuiko 135mm f2.8 back in my Olympus days in the previous millennium.) Centre sharpness at all focal lengths of the EF 35-135 is excellent and wide open it has a creaminess that softens into the corners gracefully.

I realised I should give the EF 28-135 another go, so I woke it out of its slumber, mounted it to my Canon 5D and took it out for some street photography.

Overview

The EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM was Canon’s first consumer lens (that is, not a L-series lens) with image stabilization. The lens was released in 1998 and it was in production until 2016, so there are a lot around the used market. It has a 16 element 12 group design with one aspherical element, and uses a two-touch design with separate control rings for zoom and focus.

Design and build quality are very good: focus distance window with IR correction marks, metal mount, solid plastic body, light weight with good feel. It takes an EW-78BII petal-style lens hood and a 72mm filter. The front of the lens extends but does not rotate.

For focussing it uses a ring-type ultrasonic motor that offers full-time manual focus over-ride.

The EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM is compatible with all Canon EOS analog film and EOS digital bodies. It will work with APS-C sensor bodies but the 1.6 crop factor makes the resulting angles of view unexciting.

Canon has released a profile for the EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM so corrections for chromatic aberration, distortion and peripheral illumination can be made in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional raw editing software, and for some cameras within the body itself.

Handling

The EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM is a large lens though well balanced and not particularly heavy, but wide. People in the street will notice when you point it at them, particularly if you have the lens hood fitted.

While f3.5 is reasonably fast at the wide end, f5.6 at the 135mm end is a bit slow and I found the autofocus would “jiggle” at the longest focal length. I didn’t miss any shots but it was noticeable, and not something the older EF 35-135 f3.5-4.5 would do.

The newer EF 28-135 lens feels much bigger and heavier than the 10 years older EF 35-135 but as the photo shows, it’s not: it’s only a few millimetres taller. The increased girth of the lens and the 72mm filter makes it look and feel much bigger than it is actually is. I expect many people will prefer the handling of the newer 28-135mm lens.

Results

All the photographs in the gallery below were made with a Canon EOS 5D original at 1600 ISO with the EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM lens used wide open. My rationale is that if the lens produces acceptable results wide open then it will be even better a couple of stops down. Photo captions contain the focal length and aperture used.

Yes, the EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM has some corner softness, but the centre sharpness is superb. It performs equally well at the 135mm end as the 28mm end. There is some illumination falloff at the wide end which is not a problem for street photography, and it can be corrected easily in post processing if necessary.

One image in the gallery shows flare from the sun in the frame: this is to expected from a lens with 16 elements and a dozen or so internal reflective surfaces. Some dodging and burning may have iumproved the image but I left it largely as it was.

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Conclusion

I’m no longer concerned with sharp corners wide open, I’m more interested in the overall image quality and the way the lens handles. The results I’m getting from the EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM have excellent centre sharpness with acceptable sharpness in the corners wide open.

There is no denying this is a physically big lens, though its light weight makes it easy to handle and well balanced. As a general purpose lens the EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM takes a lot of beating particularly with the image stabilisation and covers-everything zoom range.

The lens works equally well on film, so this would be a great travel lens as part of a combined analog/digital kit with a full-frame digital body like a Canon EOS 5D or 6D and an EOS film body – any EOS film body, it’s compatible with them all.

If you enjoyed this post please take a look at my other equipment reviews. Thanks.