I wanted a telezoom lens for travel, architecture and a bit of street life candid shots, and zeroed on the popular 55-250mm lens from Canon stable.

It has been told many times the 'weaknesses' of that the 55-250mm lense from Canon. So I was prepared to the downside of this lens, and managing the expectations. Some even advised "...you'll be very happy with lens for the first few days, then you'll start experiencing the limitations".

So I started of with the known issues of this lens. My biggest worry was about the image quality. It has been told that at the long end of the zoom , the image softens out. True. What I noticed is the softness is more so if the object focused is in the far side of the field. On the other hand, objects focused in the mid to nearer range are sharper enough, even though I've extended the zoom to full level to compose the image. I'm still experimenting with the lense to go beyond its known limitations.

Leaving the above, everything else told bad about this lense is trivial to my situation. I'm not into wildlife photography.So the absence of a noiseless USM doesn't matter to me.

Baring the soft image issue with the long end, the image quality is very decent. This lens gives a great blur background. IS is highly helpful.

They talk of built quality, to be specific the ruggedness. This 55-250mm lense is not in the line of those metallic looking ones people carry in demanding situations.

This won't stand a chance if that fielder chasing the ball ram on to your camera positioned at the boundary line. I'm concerned about more practical situations like shocks during travels and handling. The built quality looks decent for this.

My lens inventory is slowly swelling.That's a concern. I'm not a big fan of carrying too many things along with the camera. Nor I like to keep changing the lenses in the field. A little bit of advanced thinking is required, about what I'll be shooting and when.Though not always practical, that's a good thing anyway.