For the Canon Guys.

[RiverRat]

If you need a good walkaround zoom, a fellow on ebay is selling white-box 24-105 f/4 L lenses for $640. White box implies the lens was removed from a camera/lens kit. You forego the warranty, which is only 1 year limited anyway.

This is as good a price as I can remember seeing for a long time and the seller has a 99% approval rating. I can't personally vouch for him, but it seems legit and the offer was listed by the admin on CanonRumors.

If you haven't played with this lens, its biggest virtues are robust build quality (it is an L lens afterall) 3-stop image stablization, modest weight and the very useable zoom range. Decent bokeh for a slower lens, but you can't get the smear/dreamy quality that the $300-$350 50 and 85 mm primes offer. My copy is reasonably sharp even without microadjustment. I haven't extensively tested distortion and edge-to-edge sharpness as I'm just not that much of a pixel peeper.

All in all, I think it's one of the better walkaround lens choices if you find yourself commonly shooting longer than 40 mm. If you were to buy at this price and not like it, you could likely recoup most of the cost on resale.

[UWone77]

That's quite a good price. I bought mine from Canon Refurbished for just over $700

[zero7one]

That is my primary lens....love it, but paid full price for it.

[RiverRat]

Yeah, I've been generally happy with my copy. It's really flexible if you don't expect it to do more than a zoom should.

I think my next lens has to be a 135 mm f/2.0 L. I'm a shallow depth of field kinda guy and that thing's performance is legendary.